Background
Marcel Deprez was born on December 12, 1843, in Aillant-sur-Milleron, France.
The National School of Mines.
Deprez' and Carpentier's "fishbone" galvanometer.
An extract from one of Deprez's works.
Electrical transmission experiment from Vizille to Grenoble by Marcel Deprez, 1883.
The world's first three-phase power plant in Lauffen is visited by celebrities on the occasion of the opening of the International Electrical Exhibition in Frankfurt. Marcel Deprez is the 7th from the left.
Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers.
Académie des Sciences.
Marcel Deprez was born on December 12, 1843, in Aillant-sur-Milleron, France.
Deprez studied at the National School of Mines in Paris, but left after taking the first-year courses to devote himself to personal research.
Deprez served as a secretary at the School of Mines from 1866 to 1872. In this period he invented an improved valve and indicator mechanisms for steam engines. During the 1870 siege of Paris he conducted pioneer researches, using instruments of his own creation, on the instantaneous gas pressure, metal strain, projectile velocity, and recoil motion produced in the firing of mortar cannon.
Deprez was an early promoter, after 1875, of employing electric power in industry, and he collaborated with d’Arsonval and J. Carpentier in the design and manufacture of a wide variety of direct-current measuring instruments, and adapted small motors to manufacturing and domestic uses. He invented compound winding for voltage and speed stabilization in d.c. machines and showed how the operation of such machines could be fully determined from “open-circuit” and “short-circuit” characteristics.
Convinced of the commercial importance of transmitting power electrically, Deprez presented four dramatic and historic public demonstrations of d.c. electric power transmission, the first at Munich in 1881 and the last in 1886 when he sent seventy-five kilowatts over fifty kilometers of line from Creil to Paris. The 5,800-volt dynamo used was of his own design. He and Carpentier foresaw the advantages of high-voltage a.c. power transmission using transformers and patented the principle in 1881. but they did not develop it commercially.
In 1890 he was appointed professor of electrotechnology at the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers.
Deprez was elected to the Académie des Sciences in 1886.