(1845-1913) Swedish engineer who made a pioneering contribution to the development of high-speed steam turbines. He invented the special reduction gearing that allows a turbine rotating at high speed to drive a propeller or machine at comparatively slow speed, a principle having universal application in marine engineering.
De Laval was born in Orsa, Dalarna, and educated at the Stockholm Technical Institute and Uppsala University.
In 1887, de Laval developed a small, high-speed turbine with a speed of 42,000 revolutions per minute. He is credited with being the first to use a convergent–divergent type of nozzle in a steam turbine in order to realize the full potential energy of the expanding steam in a single-stage machine, completed 1890. He also invented various devices for the dairy industry, including a high-speed centrifugal cream separator 1878 and a vacuum milking machine, perfected 1913.
De Laval's other interests ranged from electric lighting to electrometallurgy in aerodynamics. In the 1890s he employed more than 100 engineers in developing his devices and inventions, which are exactly described in the 1,000 or more diaries he kept. + prikaži više

(1883-1945) French right-wing politician. He was prime minister and foreign secretary 1931–32, and again 1935–36. In World War II he joined Pétain's Vichy government as vice-premier in June 1940; dismissed in Dec 1940, he was reinstated by Hitler's orders as head of the government and foreign minister in 1942. After the war he was executed.
Laval, born near Vichy, entered the chamber of deputies in 1914 as a socialist, but after World War I moved toward the right. His second period as prime minister was marked by the Hoare–Laval Pact for concessions to Italy in Abyssinia (now Ethiopia). His part in the deportation of French labor to Germany during World War II made him universally hated. When the Allies invaded, he fled the country but was arrested in Austria, tried for treason, and shot after trying to poison himself. + prikaži više