Herbert Thacker Herr

Herbert Thacker Herr (born March 19, 1876, Denver, Colo., U.S.—died Dec. 19, 1933, Philadelphia) was a U.S. engineer who made important improvements in steam turbines.

After working for various U.S. railroads as a machinist and draftsman for seven years, Herr became a general superintendent of the Norfolk & Western Railway, Roanoke, Va., in 1906. Two years earlier he had invented a braking device to control trains having several locomotives and had devised a mechanism that regulated braking power according to the weight of the car.

Herr’s work on train brakes brought him to the attention of George Westinghouse, who installed Herr in the Westinghouse Machine Company in 1908 as vice president and general manager. He became a company director in 1913, and four years later became a vice president of Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company.

Herr’s improvements in steam turbines, reported in a paper entitled “Recent Developments in Steam Turbines” (1913), incorporated elements of the highly efficient Parsons system with elements of the lighter Curtis-Rateau impulse system. He also pioneered in production of “floating frame” reduction gearing for propulsion of merchant marine and naval vessels. He served as advisory engineer to the Emergency Fleet Corporation of the U.S. Shipping Board during World War I. In 1916 he perfected a remote-control system allowing a ship’s main engines to be operated from the bridge. With slight modifications his system was adopted by the U.S. Navy for some of its capital ships.