John Dixon Gibbs

John Dixon Gibbs (* 1834 in England ; † 1912 ) co-invented the first modern form of transformers for the transmission of alternating current .

Gibbs and Lucien Gaulard developed the first technically usable transformer, which was exhibited in London's Royal Aquarium in 1883 and aroused great interest at the American Westinghouse Electric Corporation . At the time, the term transformer was still unknown; those devices were called "secondary generators".

Although the law of induction, which goes back to Michael Faraday , was already known in the 1830s, it also describes the physical principles on which a transformer is based. Technically usable transformers were only available after 1883. The essential development of Gibbs at the time consisted in designing the transformer core in the form of a closed magnetic circuit from an iron wire. Two years later, in 1885, Ottó Titusz Bláthy , Miksa Déri and Károly Zipernowsky were granted a patent for transformer cores with laminated sheets to reduce eddy currents , which are still common today .

John Dixon Gibbs had an English patent on his work in addition to the German Reich patent No. 28947. However, this was contested by Sebastian Ziani de Ferranti . In the following patent litigation, the patent was revoked after a hearing in the English House of Lords and John Dixon Gibbs was financially ruined.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Borns: The electrical exhibition in the Aquarium in London , Elektrotechnische Zeitung number 4, 1883, pages 221 to 225
2. ^ Borns: Lighting by means of secondary generators. , Elektrotechnische Zeitung number 5, 1884, pages 77 to 78
3. ↑ Michael Krause: How Nikola Tesla invented the 20th century . 1st edition. Wiley-VCH, 2010, ISBN 978-3-527-50431-2 , pp. 104 to 105 .

Literature sources

• Kurt Jäger, Friedrich Heilbronner: Lexicon of electrical engineers . 2nd Edition. VDE-Verlag, 2010, ISBN 978-3-8007-2903-6 ( table of contents, 125 kB [PDF]).