René Thury (August 7, 1860 – April 23, 1938) was a Swiss pioneer in electrical engineering. He was known for his work with high voltage direct current electricity transmission and was known in the professional world as the "King of DC."
René Thury's father, Marc-Antoine Thury was teacher of Natural History. From 1874 René became an apprentice at Société Instruments Physiques, a precision machine building firm in Geneva working working for Emil B...
more
René Thury (August 7, 1860 – April 23, 1938) was a Swiss pioneer in electrical engineering. He was known for his work with high voltage direct current electricity transmission and was known in the professional world as the "King of DC."
René Thury's father, Marc-Antoine Thury was teacher of Natural History. From 1874 René became an apprentice at Société Instruments Physiques, a precision machine building firm in Geneva working working for Emil Bürgin who made refinements to the dynamos of Zénobe Gramme. When Bürgin left SIP in 1876, Thury became his successor. He was also served as a laboratory technician of Prof. Jacques-Louis Soret at the University of Geneva. Soret had acquired a Burgin dynamo placing it in series with batteries, and Thury secretly devised a means to make the batteries superfluous.
In 1877, he built a steam powered tricycle along with a medical student Jean-Jacques Nussberger who financed the project. It could reach 50 km/hr and would be one of the first Swiss...
less
