Franz Anton von Gerstner

Franz Anton Ritter von Gerstner (11 May 1796 – 12 April 1840)[1] was a civil engineer, professor and railway pioneer born in the Kingdom of Bohemia in what was then the Habsburg monarchy.

From 1838, Gerstner studied the North American railway system on behalf of representatives of the Russian tsarist court and in his own interest.

The technical achievement of Franz Anton von Gerstner mainly consists of giving a clear rejection of the "inclined plane system" (with a cable for overcoming large differences in gradient) favored by English engineers like George Stephenson on his first trip to England (1822).

Years later, Carl Ritter von Ghega expressed the same planning idea and implemented it on the Semmering railway with publicly recognized success.

Gerstner's great technical and theoretical merit is only briefly mentioned in recent literature; an exception is the publication Die Erste (österreichische) Eisenbahngesellschaft und ihr Netz (2008) by Elmar Oberegger.