About: "There is scarcely a day passing on which some new use for electricity is not discovered. It seems destined to become at some future time the means of obtaining light, heat, and mechanical force," wrote high school student Elihu Thomson. He was predicting the future of the electric art and his calling as one of America's most prolific inventors. In a career that spanned five decades, Thomson was granted 696 U.S. patents on inventions as varied as arc lights, generators, electric welding machines, and x-ray tubes. But it was the recording wattmeter, a practical method of measuring the amount of electricity used by a home or business, that brought fame and opportunity.
From modest beginnings with fellow high school science professor Edwin Houston, Thomson built one of the leading electrical companies of the nineteenth century. His experiments with alternating current, although disputed as dangerous by direct current promoter Thomas Edison, led to the adoption of alternating current technology as the U.S. standard. Six months before Thomas Edison opened his first power station in New York, Elihu Thomson's system was lighting streets in Kansas City, Missouri.
The Thomson-Houston Electric Company also found early success at global marketing, establishing subsidiary companies in Europe and South America. In 1892, the merger of Thomson-Houston and Edison General electric companies formed General Electric, and it was Professor Elihu Thomson who helped establish a tradition of regular product improvement and scientific research that led to the creation of GE's research laboratory in 1900.
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