Inventors: Who invented the hydraulic turbine in 1849 (surname only)?

Answer 1

James B. Francis did not invent the hydraulic turbines just improved it. The simplest hyd.turb. existed in ancient Greece.

James B. Francis designed a turbine in which the flow was inward, and the so-called reaction, or Francis, turbine, became the most widely used hydraulic turbine for water pressures, or heads, equivalent to a column of water 10 to 100 m (33 to 330 ft) (Microsoft® Encarta® Encyclopedia 200)..

Answer 2

Francis

James B. Francis: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_B._Francis
Improved the Boyden turbine creating the standard for all modern turbines

According to Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_turbine#Design_and_application
"In 1849, James B. Francis improved the inward flow reaction turbine to over 90% efficiency. He also conducted sophisticated tests and developed engineering methods for water turbine design. The Francis turbine, named for him, is the first modern water turbine. It is still the most widely used water turbine in the world today

All common water machines until the late 19th century (including water wheels) were reaction machines; water's pressure head acted on the machine and produced work. A reaction turbine needs to fully contain the water during energy transfer.

In 1866, California millwright Samuel Knight invented a machine that worked off a completely different concept[1][2]. Inspired by the high pressure jet systems used in hydraulic mining in the gold fields, Knight developed a bucketed wheel which captured the energy of a free jet, which had converted a high head (hundreds of vertical feet in a pipe or penstock) of water to kinetic energy. This is called an impulse or tangential turbine. The water's velocity, roughly twice the velocity of the bucket periphery, does a u-turn in the bucket and drops out of the runner at 0 velocity.

In 1879, Lester Pelton, experimenting with a Knight Wheel, developed a double bucket design, which exhausted the water to the side, eliminating some energy loss of the Knight wheel which exhausted some water back against the center of the wheel. In about 1895, William Doble improved on Pelton's half-cylindrical bucket form with an elliptical bucket that included a cut in it to allow the jet a cleaner bucket entry. This is the modern form of the Pelton turbine which today achieves up to 92% efficiency. Pelton had been quite an effective promoter of his design and although Doble took over the Pelton company he did not change the name to Doble because it had brand name recognition.

Turgo and Crossflow turbines were later impulse designs."