Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,757

This is the grave of Elihu Thomson.

Born in 1853 in Manchester, England, Thomson grew up in the United States after his family moved to Philadelphia in 1858. He was a good student, graduated from Central High School, and then became a chemistry teacher at that school, still in Philadelphia. He did that for several years, but he had bigger ambitions and interests. He was long interested in railroads and its technologies. In 1880, he quit his job so he could explore the world of electrical engineering, which was of course a brand new field of study with the amazing advancements in electricity created in the previous few years thanks to people such as Thomas Edison.

So Thomson and his fellow teacher Edwin Houston founded the Thomson-Houston Electric Company. This was set up in Lynn, Massachusetts, thanks to the investors behind its construction, who came out of that city’s shoe industry. This became one of the premier electric companies in the country. Thomson was the inventor and he ran the research lab. Among the inventions he and his workers came up with over the next few years include an arc-lighting system, the three-cord dynamo, a magnetic lighting arrester, and a power transformer. I fully confess to barely understanding most of this, which is a tribute to their success–the electrical system works in ways that regular people don’t have to understand what is going on, so long as the engineers can keep it going.

Thomson was an intensive researcher. He didn’t have much else in his life evidently and he just poured himself into this company. Between 1880 and 1885, he filed an average of 21 patent applications a year. Between 1886 and 1890, that rose to 42 patent applications a year. He spent a lot of his time trying to secure European and Canadian patents for his work. After all, the point of all of this was to make money. But that took a lot of time and energy and legal expenses and did not provide the kind of stable income he hoped. But working with people such as Houston and his shoe investors, he found better businessmen that could handle that side of his work. He kept working. There was so much that needed done with the new electrical systems. He worked on safety switches; having once been pretty heavily shocked by a poorly ground fixture in Mexico, let’s just say this is one technology I learned to appreciate. Then there was all the stuff needed to light industrial facilities and office buildings. Thomson plugged away on this kind of thing.

One of the interesting things about Thomson, and perhaps this came from his teaching years, is that he strongly believed in science and engineering as a way to bring communities together. In short, he hated the idea of the engineer in the lab being totally uninterested in anything but the problem in front of him. Rather, the scientist and engineer needed to be public figures, exciting young people about what was possible, giving public demonstrations of the work, organizing clubs and talks, etc. Basically, he wanted to create a modern infrastructure of science that would almost make it a social movement. Another big thing for him was to create the highest quality products, both for aesthetic reasons, but also because he wanted to dominate the market and he figured going higher quality would allow him to do that. I’m not sure that generally works through American history, but it worked for Thomson.

Now, it didn’t make that much economic sense for all these first rate labs to compete with each other. Thomson had long competed with Westinghouse and it caused a lot of frustration on both sides, eventually leading to a patent-sharing agreement that allowed Westinghouse to sell Thomson-Houston arc lighting equipment in exchange for manufacturing ac systems without fear of infringing on Westinghouse patents. But that was just one example. So in 1892, a bunch of the biggest capitalists in the country, led by Henry Villard, talked to Thomas Edison, Thomson, Charles Coffin, who ran the finances behind Thomas-Houston and who was behind drawing Thomson to Lynn in the first place, and others, about engaging a big merger of operation for efficiency’s sake. This became General Electric.

Thomson was offered a top role at GE. In fact, Thomson-Houston basically was all the top management at the new GE. But he didn’t want it. He only cared about one thing–research. He kept his lab in Lynn so he could avoid anything to do with corporate mandates. He worked with many of GE’s top leaders and researchers, but on his own terms. My knowledge of electrical technology is not very good, as I mentioned above. So I can’t speak much to his inventions. He did hold over 700 patents by the time he died. He also had won just about any medal someone in that field could win. That included being the first ever winner of the Edison Award from the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, in 1909. Even before that, the French government had honored him with by making him part of the Legion of Honor. As much as he hated any kind of administrative work, he did acquiesce and become president of MIT from 1920 to 1923.

Thomson died in 1937. He was 83 years old.

Elihu Thomson is buried in Pine Grove Cemetery, Lynn, Massachusetts.

If you would like this series to visit other winners of the Edison Medal, which still exists today, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Frank Sprague, who won in 1910, is in Arlington. We’ve covered the 1911 winner, George Westinghouse, and the 1912 winner, William Stanley. This series is very serious about electrical engineering. The 1913 winner, Charles Brush, is in Cleveland. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.