Charles Brown (designer)

Charles Brown (front, 3rd from right), visited the hydropower plant in Lauffen am Neckar in 1891 on the occasion of the electrical engineering exhibition

Charles Brown (born June 30, 1827 in Uxbridge , Middlesex (now London ), † October 6, 1905 in Basel ) was an English machine designer and founder of the Swiss locomotive and machine factory .

biography

Charles Brown was self-taught and a practitioner with an extraordinary spatial sense. He taught himself engineering and trained at Maudslay Machine Factory , Sons and Field in London . In 1851 he joined the Sulzer company in Winterthur , which at the time had 100 employees. He married Eugénie Pfau and had six children with her. As an employee of Sulzer, he developed a valve steam engine, for which he received the gold medal at the world exhibition in Paris in 1878 .

In 1871 he decided to leave the company because he could not win the Sulzer brothers over to build steam locomotives . Together with investors, Brown founded the Schweizerische Lokomotiv- und Maschinenfabrik (SLM) and became its director. In 1884 he moved to Maschinenfabrik Oerlikon (MFO) after receiving the offer to set up the electrical engineering department. Just one year later he left the position to set up a marine workshop in Pozzuoli on behalf of Armstrong, Mitchell & Co. ( Newcastle upon Tyne ) . From 1890 he worked as a freelance engineer in Basel .

His elder son Charles Eugene Lancelot Brown founded in 1892 together with Walter Boveri in Baden , the company Brown, Boveri & Cie. (BBC), with the father providing advisory services. The younger son Sidney Brown , who also worked in a leading position for the BBC, put together a highly regarded art collection that can be seen today in the Langmatt Museum in Baden, and in 1882 was the first president of what would later become the RV Winterthur cycling club .

source

• Otto Mittler : History of the City of Baden, Volume 2: From 1650 to the present. Sauerländer , Aarau 1965, DNB 366880357 , p. 267.

literature

• Ueli Müller: Charles Brown. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland .
• Carl Graf von Klinckowström :  Brown, Charles. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 2, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1955, ISBN 3-428-00183-4 , p. 639 f. ( Digitized version ).