Peter Emil Huber-Werdmüller

Peter Emil Huber-Werdmüller (24 December 1836 – 4 October 1915) was a Swiss industrialist who founded the engineering company Maschinenfabrik Oerlikon.

He drove forward the development of the operation purposefully, incorporated an electrical department in 1884, and appointed Charles Brown senior as its head.

In 1886, the discoverer of aluminium fused-salt electrolysis, Paul Louis Toussaint Héroult, ordered a dynamo machine from Oerlikon and, in 1887, he came to Zürich to make electrolytic tests.

Together with the entrepreneurial personalities Georg Robert Neher and Gustave Naville, President of Escher, Wyss & Cie. in Zürich, he pushed ahead with his idea of an aluminium factory in Neuhausen am Rheinfall.

The Neher family owned the water rights to the Rhine Falls, which were to be used for power generation, and their former ironworks was used for the infrastructure at this location.

Oerlikon, which at that time produced the largest direct current generators in the world, installed them for the large-scale production of electricity necessary for the enormous power requirements of the Héroult process.