William E. Sawyer

William Edward Sawyer was an American electrical engineer and inventor who lived from about 1850 to May 15, 1883, working through the formative years of electric lighting alongside the attorney Albon Man. On July 8, 1878 the pair organized the Electro-Dynamic Light Company in New York City, among the first electric-lighting companies formed anywhere in the United States, to develop and sell incandescent lamps of Sawyer's design using a carbon filament, together with a distribution system that included an early electric meter and a safety feature protecting the rest of a circuit if one lamp failed. The Sawyer-Man patents became Thomas Edison's principal courtroom rival, and the two sides fought over priority on the incandescent lamp from 1879 until 1885, a fight the Sawyer-Man side won often enough that a 1920 New York Times retrospective called Sawyer the pioneer of the development of the incandescent light. Though the Sawyer-Man lamp proved less durable than Edison's own design, it stayed in commercial use long enough to help light the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago before Westinghouse Electric bought the company and folded its patents into its own lighting business.