Aurel Boleslav Stodola was a Slovak engineer, physicist, and inventor. He was a pioneer in the area of technical thermodynamics and its applications and published his book Die Dampfturbine in 1903.
Aurel Stodola was a Slovak engineer and inventor. He originated the study of thermodynamics and produced significant work in a number of scientific fields. He was a professor at the Institute of Technology in Zurich for nearly half of his lifetime and was consulted for input on developing the gas turbine. During his tenure, he educated and influenced hundreds of engineers, including some of the greatest scientific minds of our age. During the First World War, he came across a surgeon that he collaborated with to help the injured soldiers returning from war. In 1928, he invented the first heat pump which still serves as the primary source of heat generation for Geneva, Switzerland’s city hall. As the father of steam turbines, he published a highly regarded manual that was eventually translated into several languages and is still used as a resource today. He constantly pursued new knowledge in a vast array of technical sciences, was given honorary doctorates by four universities, earned many awards and was an adviser to the Academy of Sciences in France. The Institute of Technology in Zurich declared 2009 the “Year of Aurel Stodola” and asteroid ‘3981 Stodola’ was named in his Aurel Stodola was born in Liptovsky Mikulas, Austria, to a leather manufacturer. He went to secondary school in Levoca and attended several educational institutions between the years of 1876 and 1880, including the Budapest Technical University and the University of Zurich, before earning a degree at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in mechanical engineering