Emil Bürgin

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Emil Bürgin (born August 23, 1848 in Basel ; † July 15, 1933 there ) was a Swiss electrical engineer .

After attending the humanistic high school in Lind and the upper secondary school, he did an apprenticeship in the machine factory Socin & Wick . From 1868 to 1871 he studied at the Swiss Federal Polytechnic in Zurich . After completing the officers' school, he went to Paris , where he worked as a machinist and in the evenings attended scientific lectures at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers . He traveled to New York as a ship mechanic before joining the Winterthur locomotive factory as an engineer in the fall . Under Charles Brown he designed a locomotive , the adhesion of which he increased considerably by magnetizing an axle. In 1874 he received a patent for it . Although it proved itself in experiments, it found no interest.

Bürgin DC machine, around 1880

In 1875 he developed a DC machine and a self-regulating arc lamp, which were built under license from RE Compton & Co. in London .

He then went to Geneva to the Societé de Construction d'appareils de physique (SIP) , where he and his apprentice René Thury developed an electric mine ignition device as a hand-operated DC dynamo based on plans by Théodore Turrettini . After he found a solution to reduce the ripple, this became the first mass-produced Swiss direct current dynamo for machine operation.

In 1876 he demonstrated an ice cream machine built by R. Pictet & Co. in Geneva at the World Exhibition in Philadelphia and then built an ice cream factory in New York. Here he married Ella Turner. He then headed the construction of numerous ice machine systems in southern Europe.

In March 1881 he began manufacturing machines and devices in Basel. After they were awarded the gold medal at the electricity exhibition in Paris , Ludwig Rudolf Alioth joined the company. As a result of the economic crisis, the Basel cooperatives drove them to Münchenstein, where the Bürgin & Alioth company expanded. In 1893 the company was represented at the national exhibition in Zurich. Shortly afterwards, he left the business to his partner and founded an ice cream factory in Basel am Riehenteich , which was the only one in Switzerland to liquefy carbon dioxide. After he had enlarged the factory in 1888, however, the Basel chemical industry switched to self-sufficiency and he was only left with the carbon dioxide business.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ electrosuisse.ch: Emil Bürgin (PDF; 28 kB)
  2. ↑ Archive link ( Memento of the original from September 24, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.technik-museum.ch
  3. ↑ Archive link ( Memento of the original dated July 12, 2004 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.eeh.ee.ethz.ch
  4. ^ Kaspar Birkhäuser : Alioth, Ludwig Rudolf. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland .
  5. ↑ http://www.gusewski.ch/iwb.htm
  6. ↑ http://www.baselland.ch/4-text-htm.283360.0.html

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Bürgin, Emil
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swiss electrical engineer
DATE OF BIRTH August 23, 1848
PLACE OF BIRTH Basel
DATE OF DEATH July 15, 1933
Place of death Basel