Edward Weston

Edward Weston was an English-born American electrical engineer and inventor who founded the Weston Electrical Instrument Company in Newark, New Jersey in 1888 and built it into a leading maker of precision voltmeters, ammeters and wattmeters, the instruments that let power companies and factories measure and manage the electricity they generated and consumed. In 1893 he developed the saturated cadmium cell, the Weston cell, an electrochemical standard so stable it was adopted as the international standard for electromotive force from 1911 until 1990, and he waived his own patent rights so the standard could be used freely. He also developed the resistance alloys constantan and manganin, still used in precision electrical instruments, and held 334 United States patents over his career.