Auguste Rateau

Vocation

Notable

French engineer. Rateau held a chair at the School of Mines at St. Étienne for about ten years. When, in 1897, he resigned this position, he was succeeded by M. Emile Jouquet, Rateau at an early age gave signs of mathematical talent and, when he completed his two years' study at the Ecole Polytechnique, he passed out at the head of his class. He was twenty-five years of age when in 1888 he was made a professor in the School at St. Etienne, where previously, as M. Jouquet says, Burdin was a professor arid Fourneyron, “the Watt of the hydraulic turbine”, was a student. Rateau’s work was in direct line with theirs and from it came the Rateau mine ventilators, centrifugal pumps and steam turbines. The impulse steam turbine of Rateau was applied to a French torpedo boat in 1904 and Rateau turbines, as developed by the Ateliers et Chantiers de Bretagne, Nantes, have been fitted in the fastest flotilla leaders in the world. A prominent member of many societies, Rateau was elected a member of the Paris Academy of Sciences in 1919. He died in Neuilly-sur-Seine on 13 January 1930. Link to French Wikipedia