František Křižík

František Křižík (1847 to 1941) was a Czech inventor, electrical engineer and entrepreneur, born in Plánice into a poor family. He studied at the Czech Technical University in Prague and began work repairing telegraph devices, where he soon started making his own inventions, among them a remotely operated signalling device to guard against train collisions in 1878. His automatic electric arc lamp with self-adjusting brushes, developed in Plzeň in 1880, won a gold medal at the International Exposition of Electricity in Paris in 1881 and was used for street lighting in many cities. In 1884 he founded his own company building city lighting, tramway lines, power stations and electrical equipment, and in 1895 he built one of the first electric cars in Austria-Hungary. He is regarded as a pioneer of practical electrical engineering and of electrification in Bohemia and Austria-Hungary.