Karoly Zipernowsky

Karoly Zipernowsky (1853 to 1942) was an Austrian-born Hungarian electrical engineer who worked at the Ganz company in Budapest. With his colleagues Miksa Deri and Otto Blathy he searched for ways to transmit electric power more efficiently, and their experiments led to the ZBD alternating current transformer of 1885. The design used a closed iron ring core with a coil wound around it, stepping a high transmission voltage down to a lower service voltage, and later work by others added step-up transformers for long distance lines. In 1891 he wrote what is described as the first technically viable proposal for a high speed electric railway between Vienna and Budapest. He became a corresponding member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1893 and president of the Hungarian Society of Electrical Engineers in 1905.