Thermal spraying - The inventor’s life

On the 100th anniversary of the invention of thermal spraying by Max Ulrich Schoop, a jubilee conference [1] took place in Switzerland in September 2009. Who was this inventor in fact? (Fig. 1). The answer can be found in his memoirs which Carl Seelig, a journalist and writer who is well-known due to his book called Hikes with Robert Walser, published in 1956 with the title From the life of a Swiss inventor [2] (Fig. 2). Every interested person is recommended to read this because it can indeed, with a little diligence, certainly still be purchased in second-hand bookshops and has an entertaining character. The following text constitutes a personal excerpt, compiled by Christoph Abert who already introduced Schoop's patents in Thermal Spray Bulletin 2/09 [3].