Lucien Gaulard

Lucien Gaulard was a French engineer who invented devices for the transmission of alternating current electrical energy. Working with the British engineer and financier John Dixon Gibbs, he developed an AC step down transformer that the two men publicly demonstrated in 1883 at London's Royal Aquarium, at a time before the word transformer had even been coined and the device was called a secondary generator. Their transformer used an iron core acting as a magnetic circuit, a design that was initially considered overcomplicated because it contained a moving armature, but it caught the attention of Sir Coutts Lindsay, who used it to help power the Grosvenor Gallery, one of the first lighting systems in Britain run from a central generating station. News of an 1884 exhibition of the Gaulard and Gibbs transformer in Turin, Italy reached George Westinghouse, who bought the American rights to the design in 1885 and had transformers shipped to his factory in Pittsburgh, where engineer William Stanley Jr. used and improved on their work.