Viktor Kaplan (27 November 1876 – 23 August 1934) was an Austrian engineer and the inventor of the

Kaplan turbine The Kaplan turbine is a propeller-type water turbine which has adjustable blades. It was developed in 1913 by Austrian professor Viktor Kaplan, who combined automatically adjusted propeller blades with automatically adjusted wicket gates to ach ...

Life

Kaplan was born in

Mürzzuschlag Mürzzuschlag is a town in northeastern Styria, Austria, the capital of the former Mürzzuschlag District. It is located on the Mürz river near the Semmering Pass, the border with the state of Lower Austria, about southwest of Vienna. The popu ...

Austria Austria, , bar, Östareich officially the Republic of Austria, is a country in the southern part of Central Europe, lying in the Eastern Alps. It is a federation of nine states, one of which is the capital, Vienna, the most populous ...

into a railroad worker's family. He graduated from high school in

Vienna en, Viennese , iso_code = AT-9 , registration_plate = W , postal_code_type = Postal code , postal_code = , timezone = CET , utc_offset = +1 , timezone_DST ...

in 1895, after which he attended the

Technical University of Vienna TU Wien (TUW; german: Technische Universität Wien; still known in English as the Vienna University of Technology from 1975–2014) is one of the major universities in Vienna, Austria. The university finds high international and domestic recogn ...

, where he studied

civil engineering Civil engineering is a professional engineering discipline that deals with the design, construction, and maintenance of the physical and naturally built environment, including public works such as roads, bridges, canals, dams, airports, sewa ...

and specialised in

diesel Diesel may refer to: * Diesel engine, an internal combustion engine where ignition is caused by compression * Diesel fuel, a liquid fuel used in diesel engines * Diesel locomotive, a railway locomotive in which the prime mover is a diesel engi ...

engines An engine or motor is a machine designed to convert one or more forms of energy into mechanical energy. Available energy sources include potential energy (e.g. energy of the Earth's gravitational field as exploited in hydroelectric power g ...

. From 1900 to 1901 he was drafted into military service in

Pula Pula (; also known as Pola, it, Pola , hu, Pòla, Venetian; ''Pola''; Istriot: ''Puola'', Slovene: ''Pulj'') is the largest city in Istria County, Croatia, and the seventh-largest city in the country, situated at the southern tip of the I ...

. After working in

Vienna en, Viennese , iso_code = AT-9 , registration_plate = W , postal_code_type = Postal code , postal_code = , timezone = CET , utc_offset = +1 , timezone_DST ...

with a specialisation in motors, he moved to the

German Technical University in Brno German Technical University in Brno (German: ''Deutsche Technische Hochschule Brünn'') was a technical university in Brno. It existed from 1849 to 1945 and instruction was in German. At the time, Brno was a multicultural city with both Czech and ...

to conduct research at the institute of civil engineering. He spent the next three decades of his life in

Brno Brno ( , ; german: Brünn ) is a city in the South Moravian Region of the Czech Republic. Located at the confluence of the Svitava and Svratka rivers, Brno has about 380,000 inhabitants, making it the second-largest city in the Czech Republic ...

, and nearly all his inventions and research are connected with his professorship there. In 1913 he was appointed head of the institute for

water turbine A water turbine is a rotary machine that converts kinetic energy and potential energy of water into mechanical work. Water turbines were developed in the 19th century and were widely used for industrial power prior to electrical grids. Now, ...

s. In 1912 he published his most notable work: the

, a revolutionary

that was especially fitted to produce electricity from large streams with only a moderate incline. From 1912 to 1913 he received four patents on these kinds of

turbines A turbine ( or ) (from the Greek , ''tyrbē'', or Latin ''turbo'', meaning vortex) is a rotary mechanical device that extracts energy from a fluid flow and converts it into useful Work (physics), work. The work produced by a turbine can be used ...

. In 1918 the first Kaplan turbine with 26 kW power and a diameter of 60 cm was built by the Storek construction company for a textile manufacturer in

Lower Austria Lower Austria (german: Niederösterreich; Austro-Bavarian: ''Niedaöstareich'', ''Niedaestareich'') is one of the nine states of Austria, located in the northeastern corner of the country. Since 1986, the capital of Lower Austria has been Sankt P ...

. This turbine was used until 1955 and today is exhibited at the

Technisches Museum Wien The Vienna Technical Museum (german: Technisches Museum Wien) is located in Vienna (Austria), in the Penzing district, at Mariahilferstraße 212. The decision to establish a technical museum was made in 1908, and construction of the building sta ...

. After the success of the first Kaplan turbines they started being used worldwide and remain one of the most widely used kinds of

s. In 1926 and 1934 Kaplan received

honorary doctorate An honorary degree is an academic degree for which a university (or other degree-awarding institution) has waived all of the usual requirements. It is also known by the Latin phrases ''honoris causa'' ("for the sake of the honour") or ''ad hono ...

s. He died of a

stroke A stroke is a disease, medical condition in which poor cerebral circulation, blood flow to the brain causes cell death. There are two main types of stroke: brain ischemia, ischemic, due to lack of blood flow, and intracranial hemorrhage, hemorr ...

in 1934 at

Unterach am Attersee Unterach is a village in the Austria state of Upper Austria on the southern shore of lake Attersee in the centre of the Salzkammergut region. The name derives from the Austro-Bavarian ''Untr, aha'' ~ ''between, waters'' based on the geographical ...

. Kaplan was honored and featured on the 1000 Austrian schilling banknote in 1961.

References

*Austria Forum (2009)
Kaplan, Viktor
2. January 2013

External links

*

Austrian stamp, inventors series in 1936.

Austrian stamp, birth centenary in 1976. {{DEFAULTSORT:Kaplan, Viktor 1876 births 1934 deaths People from Mürzzuschlag People from the Duchy of Styria Austrian scientists 20th-century Austrian inventors Fluid dynamicists TU Wien alumni