Born: 13 May 1819 Vienna (Austrian Empire)
Died: 8 May 1888 Venice (aged 69)
Education: A cadet at the 19th Infantry Regiment Hessen-Homburg school
Nationality: Austria-Hungary Austrian/Italian of Czech decent
Soldier, hotelier and beekeeper, best known as the inventor of the centrifugal honey extractor.
He invented a simple machine for extracting honey from the comb by means of centrifugal force.
In 1865 Hruschka announced his invention at the 14th German and Austrian beekeepers conference in Brno held on 12th to 14th September. There he demonstrated the principle by using a very basic metal tin box with a wire cloth filter with a funnel at the bottom, all this was then attached to a rope that allowed him to swing the whole apparatus around. The centrifugal force this rotation produced extracted the honey from an uncapped piece of honeycomb which was placed in the device and the liquid honey flowed down the funnel collecting in a glass jar fastened to the bottom. The process also had the advantage that it was non-distructive allowing the honeycombs to be reused in the hives again.
Hruschka had been looking at the use of centrifugal machines in sugar refineries that were used to help remove larger particles from the molasses as part of the process to produce refined sugar.
At the time of the demonstration to the beekeepers conference Hruschka had already designed several far larger more advanced versions, one of which used a hand crank with toothed cogwheels so as to spin the combs around a central axis, surrounded by a protection screen to catch the honey being flung out, more like the extractors we know today. Hruschka began manufacturing and selling the original model that he had demonstrated at the conference and he displayed examples of these at an exhibition in Milan in1868.
