Moses G. Farmer

Moses Gerrish Farmer was an American electrical engineer and inventor who worked mostly around Salem and Boston, Massachusetts, and lived from February 9, 1820 to May 25, 1893. In 1859, at his home on Pearl Street in Salem, he lit his own parlor with a platinum filament incandescent lamp of his own construction, which by his own account made it the first house in the world lit by electricity, decades before Edison's commercial lamp. That same year he conceived the principle of the self-exciting dynamo, a generator that produces its own field current rather than needing a separate battery, and built a working example the following year; with his sometime partner William Wallace he later built a dynamo that powered a display of arc lights at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, and in 1868 he used a Farmer dynamo to light a house in Massachusetts by electricity. Despite this string of firsts, Farmer rarely pressed his own priority: he and his wife held that his talents were a gift rather than a personal possession, and he felt he should not claim credit for his inventions, a reluctance that repeatedly let others carry his ideas to commercial success in his place.