| At
the age of 21, Elihu Thomson, the son of Scottish immigrants was elected
to the Franklin Institute in 1874. His first meeting was to hear a
report on the new Gramme dynamo recently imported from France. Thomson
studied natural philosophy in high school where Edwin Houston was
his teacher. As the result of his studies he built static electric
machines. He wrote as a student, "There is scarcely a day passing
on which some new use for electricity is not discovered. It seems
destined to become at some future time the means of obtaining light,
heat, and mechanical force." During his fifty year career Thomson
was granted 696 U.S. patents on inventions including arc lights, generators,
electric welding machines, and x-ray tubes. His recording wattmeter
was the first practical method of measuring the amount of electricity
used by a home or business. He was the founder of the General Electric
company. |
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