Franz Xaver Riepl

Franz Xaver Riepl (29 November 1790 – 25 April 1857) was an important Austrian geologist, railway pioneer and metallurgical specialist.

Riepl was born in Graz, Styria where his father worked as a building inspector. He attended the mining college in Schemnitz (present-day Banská Štiavnica, Slovakia) and, back in Graz, worked with the famous geologist Friedrich Mohs (1773–1839) at the Joanneum technical college. From 1816 he was employed at the Fürstenberg iron mines in Nižbor (Nischburg), Bohemia and undertook extended study tours through Saxony, Bavaria, Prussian Silesia, and Moravia.

Between 1819 and 1835 he worked as a professor at the Imperial and Royal Polytechnic Institute in Vienna. During the 1820s, Riepl again made study trips through the Inner Austrian and Illyrian provinces of the Austrian monarchy; it was from him that the initiative came to quarry the Styrian Erzberg using open cast mining. He also assisted the Austrian State Chancellor Prince Klemens von Metternich establishing iron works on his estates in Plasy, Bohemia. With the support of the Olomouc Cardinal Archduke Rudolf of Austria, he also worked as a surveyor at the Friedland (Frýdlant) mines in Moravia. In 1829 he gave the impulse for building the important Witkowitz iron works nearby, where he introduced the English puddling process.

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