Moritz von Jacobi

Moritz Hermann von Jacobi, also known as Boris Semyonovich Yakobi, was a German-Russian electrical engineer and physicist who worked at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Saint Petersburg. His research on electromagnetic motors led to a notable early experiment in electric propulsion. In 1839, with financial help from Tsar Nicholas I, he built a 28-foot motor boat powered by battery cells, which carried 14 passengers on the Neva river against the current at about three miles per hour. The same research led him to the maximum power theorem, sometimes called Jacobi's law. He also discovered galvanoplastics, or electrotyping, in 1838, built an underground cable telegraph line between Saint Petersburg and Tsarskoe Selo, and developed a naval mine in 1853. His brother was the mathematician Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi.