Charles Grafton Page

Charles Grafton Page was an American electrical experimenter, physician, chemistry professor and patent examiner, born in Salem, Massachusetts in 1812 and died in Washington, D.C. in 1868. Working alongside contemporaries such as Michael Faraday and Joseph Henry in the earliest years of practical electromagnetism, Page built coil instruments combining primary and secondary windings around an iron core that became the direct ancestor of the induction coil, and invented an early electromagnetic circuit interrupter that repeatedly broke and remade contact by lifting electrodes out of a pool of mercury. His most ambitious project was a full-sized electromagnetic locomotive powered entirely by batteries, which in an 1851 test run reached about nineteen miles per hour over five miles before mechanical failures ended the demonstration and forced Page to return to Washington. Though the locomotive itself went nowhere commercially, Page's insistence on patenting his discoveries, against a scientific establishment that then looked down on the practice, helped open the way for electrical invention to become a paying profession.