Victor Wouk, who died Thursday at age 86, was an electrical engineer whose research in AC/DC converters led him to develop an early version of the modern hybrid automobile.

Capable of reaching speeds of up to 85 mph (at which point the rattling of nonstandard engineering grew too scary to accelerate), Wouk’s hybrid electric/internal combustion 1972 Buick Skylark prefigured today’s hybrids but did not lead directly to them.

Wouk’s hybrid was developed as a method of reducing tailpipe emissions. The project took on additional urgency as oil supplies tightened after 1973. Wouk’s research ended in the late 1970s after the Environmental Protection Agency, which had indicated it might purchase a fleet of the vehicles, abruptly withdrew support from the project.

More an engineer than an industrialist, Wouk continued to advocate for the concept and pressed the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to adopt hybrid technology for crosstown shuttle buses, something the authority continues to experiment with.

Wouk was born in New York, the son of a prosperous laundry owner. He studied engineering as an undergraduate at Columbia University and became friendly with television pioneer Edwin Howard Armstrong. This led to Wouk’s participating in the first-ever television broadcast of a baseball game, between Columbia and Princeton, in 1939. Wouk’s part in it was to climb a steep roof on Philosophy Hall to reorient an antenna from the Empire State Building toward Baker Field, at the northern end of Manhattan, where the game was being played and broadcast. It was estimated that there were 400 television sets in the city at the time.

Wouk went on to do graduate work at the California Institute of Technology, and wrote his doctoral dissertation on whether it was necessary for chains to be dragged under gasoline trucks to disperse static electricity during deliveries. He found it wasn’t, a discovery that he claimed saved the industry $1.3 million a year.

After receiving his doctorate in 1942, Wouk went to work for Westinghouse in Pittsburgh, where he developed high-voltage controls for centrifuges used to purify uranium for the Manhattan Project.

After the war, Wouk founded Beta Electric Corp., which eventually became one of the nation’s leading suppliers of high-voltage electrical supplies. He sold Beta in 1956 and founded a new company to manufacture AC/DC converters. When Russell Feldmann, one of the founders of Motorola and an early electric-car enthusiast, had problems modifying a fleet of Renault Dauphines in which he had installed batteries and electric motors, he brought in Wouk for a consultation.

Wouk soon realized that there was a fundamental problem with the technology, that batteries alone could not provide enough power for quick acceleration. After Feldmann dropped the project, Wouk kept working on it. Eventually, he arrived at the solution of using a small conventional engine together with batteries and an electric motor. It was not the first time a hybrid had been conceived – versions had been proposed early in the 20th century – but Wouk’s solution was both successful (his prototypes worked) and timely, because it came along at a time of rising concern about smog and scarcity of raw materials.

He said that he chose the Skylark for a prototype because of the extremely large space available under the hood. He packed the area with batteries, a motor, and a Wankel rotary engine, chosen because it was extremely compact. The first version got 30 miles to the gallon, not unusual by modern standards but twice the Skylark’s normal tally.

After undergoing a long series of EPA tests, Wouk’s prototype was rejected, and he folded his company, Petro-Electric Motors Ltd. He was convinced that the rejection was rigged by a biased bureaucrat, and he spent subsequent decades writing articles and letters to the editor, insisting that hybrids were the way forward. He was gratified when the Toyota Prius made its debut in 1997. He bought a white one.

Although rejection by the EPA left him exhausted and disgusted, Wouk was by no means finished. He continued to lobby and consult, and, wrote letters to the editor on diverse topics, such as superconductivity, the moon’s orbit, Lyme disease (which he and his wife contracted), and the properties of near beer.

His brother, Herman Wouk, dedicated his most recent novel, “A Hole in Texas,” to Victor. Its hero is a scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The character Palmer Kirby in “War and Remembrance,” a CalTech alum, is said to be based on Victor. His family endowed a lecture series in his name at CalTech, and Wouk was conscious enough to listen via remote hookup to the inaugural speech, which happened to coincide with the night of his death.

Victor Wouk

Born April 27, 1919, in New York; died May 19 at home in New York, of cancer; survived by his wife of 64 years, Joy Lattman Wouk, his sons, Jonathan and Jordan, and a grandson.