Otto Benedikt

He lived in exile in Austria and then the Soviet Union between 1920 and 1955. In Vienna, he mostly earned his living as a factory worker, but in the meantime he graduated from the Vienna University of Technology, where he earned a doctorate in electrical engineering and technology in 1930.
In the 1920s, he developed a special, self-compensated, alternating current commutator motor, the so-called Benedikt motor.

In 1932 (at the invitation of the Stalinist government) he moved from Vienna to Moscow, where until 1939 he was a scientific advisor to the Kirov Dynamo Electric Plant in Moscow, directing the industrial production of his engine (his engine was mainly used in the Soviet Union, for railway traction).
From 1940 to 1955, he was a professor and head of the department at the Moscow Institute of Transport Engineering (MIIT). The Institute later awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1971.

In 1955, he returned to Hungary and immediately organized the Department of Special Electrical Machines (from 1961 Electrical Machines) at the Budapest University of Technology (BME), where he was the head of the department until 1966. He was a major advocate of the importance of automation and technical cybernetics research based on broad mathematical foundations. He introduced the subjects of Special Electrical Machines, Industrial Electronics and Electric Drives into university education, for which he wrote textbooks and notes together with the department's colleagues.
He was also the rector of BME between 1957 and 1958. In 1976 he was awarded an honorary doctorate by BME.

His main research area is electrical machines, primarily the development of a type of unidirectional motor, and the improvement of the operating principle of automated electrically driven machines. His significant theoretical achievement is the nomographic calculation method developed in the 1930s, with which he significantly contributed to the simplification and precision of the design of electrical machines. Later, as a further development of the Benedikt motor, he developed the widely used automated amplifying machine, which he called the autodyne.

In 1960, he organized and led the Hungarian Academy of Sciences Automation Research Laboratory (later: Automation Research Institute, AKI), of which he was the director from 1966 to 1970, and after 1971 he was the scientific advisor of AKI and then of its successor institution, the Computer Science and Automation Research Institute (SZTAKI).

In 1956, he was elected a corresponding member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and in 1958, a full member. From 1959, he was chairman of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences' automation and energy group, from 1960, of the automation research group, and from 1964, of the energy committee of the Scientific Qualification Committee. From 1967, he was a member of the invention committee. From 1959, he was vice-president of the International Federation of Automation (IFAC), and from 1961, honorary president of the Hungarian Electrotechnical Association. He contributed to the establishment of the National Technical Development Committee (OMFB), of which he was a member of the presidency.

His awards: Kossuth Prize, second degree (1958); Academic Gold Medal (1968); Order of Merit for Labor (1958, 1962); Order of Merit for the Red Banner of Labor (1967); Order of Merit for the Socialist Fatherland (1967); Gold degree of the Order of Merit for Labor (1968).