Pavel Yablochkov

Pavel Yablochkov was a Russian electrical engineer who invented the Yablochkov candle in 1876, a simplified arc lamp that placed two parallel carbon rods side by side separated by insulating material, eliminating the complex clockwork regulators earlier arc lamps required. His candles lit streets and public buildings across Paris, London and Saint Petersburg in the late 1870s in one of the first large-scale demonstrations of electric lighting, and his parallel work distributing alternating current to multiple lamps from a single generator using induction coils anticipated the transformer-based AC distribution systems that would later displace his own invention.