From 1874 René became an apprentice at Société Instruments Physiques,[1] a precision machine building firm in Geneva working for Emil Bürgin who made refinements to the dynamos of Zénobe Gramme.

[1]In 1885 he built a system to supply Bözingen (a municipality now part of Biel/Bienne) with 30 kW of power generated from nearby Taubenlochschlucht gorge using DC transmission at 500 volts.

[8] After his resignation in 1910, he worked as a consultant, building in France a high-frequency generator for wireless telegraph transmissions operating at 40 kilohertz with a 1000 kW maximum output.

Marcel Deprez explored early transmission using direct current but avoiding transformers by placing generators and loads in series[9] as arc light systems of Charles F. Brush did.

Earlier the company had built a water supply for Genoa from the Gorzente River, and were interested whether turbines for electrical generation might address their long standing problem of reducing excess pressure.

The first turbine of 140 hp (100 kW) was installed at Galvani station, which turned the two Thury 6-pole dynamos that each produce 1000 to 1100 volts at 45 amperes.

Additional generation plants followed providing lighting as well as motive power to a number of mills, factories and railway repair shops.

The Thury system powered a 60 hp (44 kW) motor which drove via belts twelve Siemens and two Technomasio dynamos for the station's lights.

Attention was turned to conversion of DC to lower voltages that was more efficient and less cumbersome that mechanically driving smaller generators as in the Sampierdarena Railway station example.

This was a challenge for all DC systems because the induction principle used in the step down transformers pioneered by Lucien Gaulard and ZBD in the early 1880s only worked with AC.