People
The rector who took students from lectures to real machines
From Adamov to the decks of cruisers
Zdeněk Elger of Elgenfeld was born in the Rakovník region. After attending a secondary school (Realschule) in Hradec Králové, he studied mechanical engineering at the Czech Technical University in Prague, and immediately after his graduation in 1893 he joined the engineering company Märky, Bromovský & Schulz in Hradec Králové.
It was this company that brought him to Moravia when, in 1899, it appointed Elger, then only twenty-seven years old, chief engineer and director of its engineering works in Adamov. The plant, employing more than 600 workers, had until then focused mainly on equipment for breweries, distilleries, mills and sugar refineries. Elger added a new line of production: refrigeration machines.
It was in Adamov that the first domestically built refrigeration machines for the Austro-Hungarian Navy were produced, specifically for the protected cruiser SMS Szigetvár and the armoured cruiser SMS Kaiser Karl VI. Both ships later also served during the First World War. Elger also provided consultancy on refrigeration calculations and tests for Italian and Russian ships, as well as for industrial plants on land.
The professor who taught at the machines
Zdeněk Elger was invited to join the newly founded Czech Technical University in Brno by Professor Josef Líčka, with the support of Minister Antonín Rezek, who happened to be staying in Adamov at the time. On 27 October 1901, Elger was appointed full professor of general and theoretical machine science and was entrusted with building a heat laboratory at the Department of Mechanical Engineering, the predecessor of today’s Faculty of Mechanical Engineering (FME).
From the outset, he wanted students not only to know machines from lectures, but also to have the opportunity to try them out for themselves. He therefore introduced compulsory practical exercises with machines. As the school initially had no machines of its own, testing took place on steam engines and boilers directly in Brno factories and, when there were not enough of them willing to accommodate the Czech technical university, outside Brno as well. He gradually added the testing of heat engines to the curriculum and, from the academic year 1913/14, lectures on the design of refrigeration machines, which, according to a publication of the time, were the very first of their kind in Austria. In 1926, practical exercises on fuels and oils were added. He also explained his approach to students in the matriculation address he delivered as Rector in December 1905:
“Specialist lectures are accompanied by exercises, by the application of what has been lectured in design exercises, and indeed, insofar as the means permit at this time of scarcity of technical laboratories, by exercises on actual machines; the student is guided towards independent work and his capacity for independent judgement is awakened.”
When the new buildings of the technical university on Veveří Street were opened on 24 June 1911, he was already able to show visitors a well-equipped mechanical engineering laboratory. Until his retirement, he continued to expand it with the most modern measuring and control instruments and new testing stations.
Expert and specialist beyond the lecture hall
Elger’s expertise was also put to use beyond the walls of the university. In November 1920, an official car overturned near Holubice carrying members of a Brno municipal commission after it collided with a foal. The accident claimed two lives, including that of Elger’s colleague from the Brno technical university, Associate Professor Vladislav Rybka, who was also the City of Brno’s Director of Building Works. When the case came before the court for the second time in 1923, Elger, acting as an expert witness, refuted the claim that the driver had had sufficient time to stop, and the court acquitted the driver.
Elger was also a councillor of the Patent Court in Prague, sat on examination boards for car drivers and locomotive drivers, and from 1927 to 1937 chaired the board for the Second State Examination in Mechanical Engineering. For a whole decade, he thus had a say in who would become an engineer.
Zdeněk Elger’s legacy
Zdeněk Elger wanted students not only to know machines from lectures, but also to be able to work with them. His fuel testing laboratory was in fact the first of its kind at a mechanical engineering department of any university in the country.
The fields to which he devoted himself remain among the foundations of energy engineering studies at FME to this day. Students learn about boilers and turbines, heat exchangers, heat pumps and air-conditioning systems, and verify the theory in the laboratories of the Energy Institute, for example in the fuel laboratory, the heat exchanger laboratory or the climate chamber.
His influence can also be seen in the careers of his assistants. Eugen Gregor became director of the Škoda Works in Prague, Jan Polák headed the refrigeration machine department at the Českomoravská-Kolben company, and Karel Staller worked at Zbrojovka Brno (the Brno Arms Factory).
In 1937, after a year of sick leave, Zdeněk Elger retired at his own request, and he died in 1940. A reminder of his time in Brno remains to this day in the Art Nouveau house at 8 Pellicova Street, which also bears his memorial plaque.
Elger’s technical legacy was carried on by his family as well. His son Jiří Maria Elger studied mechanical engineering at the Brno technical university from 1919 to 1923, and in the final year of his studies his father was his Dean. After working in Adamov and at Zbrojovka Brno, he founded his own company manufacturing hacksaw blades, where, among other things, during the Second World War, as part of the resistance, spray bottles intended as a bacteriological weapon were assembled from components designed by Jiří Elger.
The technical knowledge of father and son thus left its mark on military history. Elger himself, however, placed greater emphasis on the importance of knowledge: at matriculation, he advised students to “arm themselves properly with knowledge, the finest of weapons” for life.
Author: Tereza Walsbergerová
---
Article sources: VUTIUM Press, BUT Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, Encyclopaedia of the History of the City of Brno, Z. Elger’s matriculation address (1905), BUT Archives.
Women from BUT who move the world of science and technology
I don't call the students by name, I respect them very much, says Šárka Mikmeková
I enjoy applying mechanical engineering to the human body, says doctoral student
ARGO underwater: Prototype of student submarine on display at IDET Fair
"Thanks to Formula, my studies make sense," says Anna Piarová, the new head of TU Brno Racing