Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,697
By This is the grave of William Stanley.
Born in 1858 in Brooklyn, Stanley grew up well off and ended up at Yale, where he graduated in 1881. He was a tinkerer as a kid, but actually intended on studying the law at first. He was into engineering and physics and all that stuff and he got a job working in fire alarm manufacturing, which was a developing technology at that time. Frankly, I wish my smoke alarm wouldn’t go off at the first moment every time I am cooking on the stovetop, which happens even with the steam vent on! It didn’t take long for George Westinghouse to see the potential of this young and he hired him to work in his Pittsburgh plant. Working for the capitalist, Stanley built on the new ideas around alternating current coming out of Europe. Specifically, in 1881, Lucian Gaulard and John Dixon Gibbs had built a prototype transformer in their London lab. They first demonstrated it in London in 1883 and then again in Turin in 1884. Westinghouse bought the rights for their design in the United States and set Stanley on working it out. He built Stanley a lab in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, as the latter hated the air pollution of Pittsburgh and who could blame him for that?
On March 20, 1886, Stanley demonstrated his advancements, creating high voltage alternating current transmission. This was absolutely critical in the spread of electricity in the nation and the world. In fact, you could argue that Stanley, along with Gaulard and Gibbs of course, are among the unsung heroes of the modern world. He started his demonstrations by lighting up the entire main street of Great Barrington. Westinghouse almost immediately brought this to Pittsburgh and by the summer of 1886, electricity could be provided in that city up to 3 miles away from its generation. Another key adaptation from Stanley was a much better alternator. The German company Siemens had developed an earlier version of one, but it wasn’t really that good.
Stanley went out on his own in 1890, founding the Stanley Electric Manufacturing Company in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. He then sold a controlling stake in it to General Electric in 1903, but he was still involved. He still worked on inventions and in fact was granted 129 patents in his life, most of which were around electricity, but which also included light bulbs of various kinds.
Stanley also basically invented the modern coffee thermos, for which many of you will see him as even more a hero! I personally hate coffee, so I don’t care, but he was working on electric ovens and trying different ideas with steel. What he realized is that properly heated steel could keep something hot for a long time and of course he thought, well everyone likes hot coffee! There were thermoses before, but they were made of glass and not only cooled the coffee too quickly but also of course could break, whereas you weren’t breaking a steel thermos. So he created a whole new company for this, Stanley Insulating Company. Stanley thermoses are presently in a huge comeback among young people. Everyone is carrying around their giant Stanley, including my wife, who uses it for tea.
One interesting note is that his son is the Stanley from Morgan Stanley. Harold Stanley and J.P. Morgan’s grandson Henry Sturgis Morgan founded that company in 1935. But this gives you a sense of the circles Stanley was running in after he got rich.
Stanley died in 1916. He was 57 years old.
William Stanley is buried in Mahaiwe Cemetery, Great Barrington, Massachusetts.
Stanley was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, which is a real museum in Alexandria, Virginia, in 1995. If you would like this series to visit other inventors inducted in 95, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. John C. Sheehan, who did a lot of work on penicillin, is in Battle Creek, Michigan and Stephanie Kwolek, who invented Kevlar, is in Lower Burrell, Pennsylvania. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.