THOMSON, ELIHU

(b. Manchester, England, 29 March 1853; d. Swampscott, Massachusetts, 13 March 1937)

electrical engineering.

Thomson was the second of ten children of Scots parents of the skilled artisan class. When he was five the family moved to Philadelphia, where he graduated from the Central High School (then an advanced academy of the Gymnasium type) shortly before his seventeenth birthday. He became the assistant of E. J. Houston and then a teacher at the school. With Houston, Thomson collaborated in experiments that refuted Edison’s claim to have discovered a “new force” (wireless transmission) and in other inventions, notably arc lights. They also started the Thomson-Houston Co., a predecessor of the General Electric Co., with which Thomson remained associated throughout his long career.

Thomson’s inventions made possible significant improvements in alternating-current motors and transformers, both developments of the first importance in the history of electrical engineering. He invented electric resistance welding and also contributed to improvements in electric control, instrumentation, and radiology. Altogether, Thomson was the recipient of more than seven hundred patents and many awards, not all of which were related to electrical engineering. For instance, he discovered that a mixture of helium and oxygen prevents caisson disease, or bends.

During World War I, Thomson and others attempted to create an engineering school (financed from a bequest by the industrialist Gordon McKay) that would be jointly operated by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The project came to nothing when the courts ruled against use of the bequest for that purpose. When the MIT presidency fell vacant in 1919, Thomson was asked to fill the post. He declined but was acting president from 1921 to 1923.

Thomson combined solid achievement with great ingenuity and an uncanny sense for turning ideas and inventions into practical and highly profitable devices. He is also reckoned as one of the pioneers of the electrical manufacturing industry in the United States, in the development of which he took an active part for over half a century.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. Thomson wrote no books; his writings are his patents and technical papers, several of which were deemed sufficiently important for inclusion in Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution: for example, see (1897). 125–136; (1899), 119–130; (1900), 333–358; (1904), 281–285; and (1913), 243–260. Thomson was also a prolific letter writer. His papers, comprising 13,600 items and 43 vols. of letter books, are in the library of the American Philosophical Society. Some of the letters that he wrote and received have been published in an annotated vol., H. J. Abrahams and M. B. Savin, eds., Selections From the Scientific Correspondence of Elihu Thomson (Cambridge, Mass., 1971): but they are limited to his scientific interests and throw only oblique light on his more important activities as a technologist.

II. Secondary Literature. The only full-scale biography is D. O. Woodbury. Elihu Thomson: Beloved Scientist, 1853–1937 (Cambridge, Mass., 1944, 1960), written in a popular style and lacking all bibliographical apparatus. See also Dictionary of American Biography, supp. 2 (New York, 1958), 657–659; The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, XXVII (New York, 1939), 28–30; and Karl T. Compton, in Biographical Memoirs. National Academy of Sciences, 21 (1941), 143–179.

Charles SÜsskind