Milan Vidmar

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Milan Vidmar (June 22, 1885 – October 9, 1962) was a Slovene electrical engineer, chess player, chess theorist, philosopher and writer, born in Ljubljana, Austria-Hungary (now Slovenia). He was a specialist in power transformers and transmission of electric current.

He began to study mechanical engineering in 1902, and he graduated in 1907 at the University of Vienna. He got his doctor's degree in 1911 from the Technical faculty in Vienna. The study of electrical engineering at Technical faculty began not until 1904, so Vidmar had to take special examinations of the field basics. He was a professor at the University of Ljubljana, a member of the Slovene Academy of Arts and Sciences (SAZU), and the founder of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering. Between 1928 and 1929 he was the 10th Chancellor of the University of Ljubljana. In 1948 he established the Institute of Electrotechnics that now bears his name.

Vidmar was also a top-class chess International Grandmaster, probably one of the top half dozen players in the world from 1911 to 1929, all while remaining an amateur.

His successes include high places at some of the top chess tournaments of his time, e.g. Karlsbad 1907, 3rd at Prague 1908, 2nd at San Sebastian 1911 with Akiba Rubinstein behind José Raúl Capablanca, Budapest 1912, Ist at Vienna and Berlin in 1918, 2nd at Košice 1928, 3rd at London 1922 behind José Raúl Capablanca and Alexander Alekhine, Hastings 1925, 3rd at Semmering 1926, 4th at New York 1927, 4th at London 1927, 5th at Karlsbad 1929, Bled 1939, Basel 1952). The Slovene Chess Federation organizes an international chess grandmaster tournament named the Milan Vidmar memorial.

Vidmar became an arbiter, and was chief referee for the 1948 World Chess Championship tournament in The Hague/Moscow.

Vidmar wrote several books on chess, including Pol stoletja ob šahovnici (Half a century at the chessboard) (Ljubljana 1951), Šah (Chess), Razgovori o šahu z začetnikom (Conversations on chess with a beginner), and, in German, Goldene Schachzeiten (The Golden Times of Chess) and others Transformatorji (Transformers), Problemi prenosa električne energije (Problems of electric energy transmission), Pogovori o elektrotehniki (Talkings about electrotechnics), Med Evropo in Ameriko (Between Europe and America), Moj pogled na svet (My view of the World), Oslovski most (Pons asinorum) (Merkur, Ljubljana 1936).

The "ZBD" model transformer was invented by three Hungarian engineers: Ottó Bláthy, Miksa Déri and Károly Zipernowsky in a year of Vidmar's birth in 1885 (and in the same year Stanley invents his transformer).