Gustav de Laval: Pioneer in developing dairy industry

Gustav de Laval was born on May 9, 1845 at Osra, Sweden. He hailed from a family that had emigrated to Sweden from France in the early seventeenth century. Little is known about his boyhood and school education.

GUSTAV DE Laval studied at the Stockholm Technical Institute and graduated from the Uppsala University. He showed unfailing vigour and variety of interests in inventing new types of machines.

In 1878 de Laval invented the high speed centrifugal cream separator that incorporated a turbine. This machine was used in large dairies and found a ready market throughout the world. He followed this up with various devices for the dairy industry, notably a vacuum milking machine he perfected in 1913.

De Laval's greatest achievement lay in the development of the steam turbine required for his machine. In the absence of reliable data on the properties of steam, he solved the problem of high velocity by incorporating special features in the design of the wheel carrying the vanes of the turbine. He was the first to employ a "convergent-divergent" type of nozzle in order to realise the full potential energy of the expanding steam. The turbine disc had a hyperbolic profile. After several years of experiments, he completed his prototype in 1890.

For driving cream separators he originally developed the small high-speed turbines with a single row of blades and a speed of 42,000 r.p.m. Although several of these were used, he did not consider them practical for commercial application. So he turned to the development of simple impulse turbines.

During 1889 and 1897 he built a large number of impulse turbines of varying size (delivering five to several hundred horse-power). He also invented the special reduction gearing which enables a turbine rotating at high speed to drive a machine at comparatively slow-speed. This principle has found application in marine engineering.

He is often likened to Thomas Edison (1847-1931) in respect of inventive talent. But Edison was poor and had no school education; at the age of 10, he divided his time between private studies and the sale of newspapers.

De Laval's interests ranged from electric lighting to aerodynamics. In the 1890's he employed over a hundred engineers in developing his inventions. He died on February 2, 1913. His inventions are exactly described in the thousand or more dairies he maintained. These are preserved in the Swedish Technical Museum, Stockholm. (The Hutchinson Dictionary of Scientific Biography, Helicon Publishing Ltd., Oxford, 1994).

R.Parthasarathy

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