| Electrical
engineer and inventor, born in Manchester, England. He emigrated to America
with his family at age 5 and attended Philadelphia schools. With the support
of Edwin J Houston (1847--1914), a teacher at a Philadelphia high school
where Thomson also taught (1870--6), Thomson began experimenting with
electricity. Thomson and Houston together invented an arc street-lighting
system (patented 1881) and established a company to manufacture this and
other innovations. Thomson stayed on as a consultant when in 1892 the
firm merged with the Edison General Electric Co to become General Electric
Co. He became a lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(MIT) in 1894 and was acting president at MIT from 1920--2. In a long
and industrious life he patented some 700 inventions and designs. He was
the inventor of electric welding and a centrifugal cream separator, among
many other devices, and he helped to develop stereoscopic x-ray pictures. |