Building the Electric Power Industry: Ten Pioneers from Dynamo to Utility

In 1866 Werner von Siemens discovered the dynamo-electric principle, in which a generator sustains its own magnetic field by self-excitation instead of needing an external permanent magnet. That is where the path begins, because it made large-scale electricity generation practical.

Charles F. Brush built one of the first commercially successful arc lighting systems in the United States in the late 1870s, which helped make electric street and industrial lighting a business. In 1888 he also built a large wind turbine at his Cleveland home, which ran for about twenty years.

Thomas Edison built the first complete system of electric light and power: a practical incandescent lamp in 1879, then generation, distribution and metering together at Pearl Street Station in Manhattan in 1882, the first central power station serving paying customers. His backing of direct current later lost the war of currents to alternating current.

Charles Parsons filed his first steam turbine patents on 23 April 1884, setting out to build a turbine fit to drive dynamos. The turbo-generator he created still produces most of the world's electricity, so every later stop on this path depends on his machine at the generating end.

In 1885 Galileo Ferraris independently discovered the rotating magnetic field, the physical basis of the induction motor, and published it openly rather than patenting it. Working almost at the same time as Nikola Tesla, he saw his priority overshadowed for decades by Tesla's patented version.

Sebastian Ziani de Ferranti designed the Deptford Power Station in London, which began supplying power in 1889. It used far higher voltages than earlier systems and proved that alternating current could serve a large metropolitan area from a single central station.

Mikhail Dolivo-Dobrovolsky developed the three-phase alternating current system, with its own transformer, generator and induction motor. At the 1891 Frankfurt exhibition he sent power over 175 kilometers, and three-phase power remains the basis of virtually every grid in the world.

Elihu Thomson co-founded the Thomson-Houston Electric Company, which in 1892 merged with Edison General Electric to form the General Electric Company. His patents on alternating current distribution equipment made his firm one of the two dominant electrical manufacturers of the late nineteenth century.

Charles Proteus Steinmetz, chief consulting engineer at General Electric, gave alternating current design its mathematics through a symbolic method using complex numbers. His work on hysteresis let engineers predict and reduce energy losses in transformer and motor cores.

Samuel Insull built Commonwealth Edison in Chicago into one of the largest electric utilities in the United States and pioneered the modern power company model of large central stations, load diversification and metered pricing. His holding company empire collapsed after the 1929 crash, though he was acquitted on fraud charges.