Hippolyte Fontaine

Hippolyte Fontaine was a French electrical engineer, born in Dijon in 1833 and died in Hyeres in 1910, who spent the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and 1871 managing cannon production in Paris before turning to the infant electrical industry. In 1871 he was hired to manage the Societe des Machines magneto-electriques Gramme, the company built around the dynamo the Belgian engineer Zenobe Gramme had developed, and his engineering work there was central to turning the Gramme machine from a laboratory device into what is described as the first industrially viable electrical generator. At the 1873 Vienna World's Fair, Fontaine and Gramme sent current from one such dynamo through roughly two kilometers of wire to drive a second dynamo as a motor at the far end, an experiment generally credited as the first transmission of electrical power over a real distance. Fontaine went on to organize the 1881 Paris International Exposition of Electricity, one of the first major public showcases of the new electrical industry, and was awarded the Legion of Honor for his work.