Robert Durrer

Robert Durrer was a Swiss engineer who invented the basic oxygen steelmaking process, also called the Linz-Donawitz process after the towns where it was commercialized. He graduated from the Royal Technical University of Aachen in 1915, took the chair of metallurgy at the Technische Universitaet Berlin in 1928, and returned to Switzerland in 1943, where he joined the board of von Roll AG and became a professor at ETH Zurich. With Heinrich Heilbruegge he produced the first oxygen blown steel on 1 April 1948, and the Austrian companies VOEST and OEAMG then commercialized the process, with converters running from 1952 and 1953. He also edited the multi-volume Metallurgie des Eisens.