Oliver B. Shallenberger

Oliver B. Shallenberger

Shallenberger meter

Oliver Blackburn Shallenberger (born May 7, 1860 in Rochester , Beaver County (Pennsylvania) , †  January 23, 1898 ) was an American engineer and inventor.

His parents were the doctor Aaron T. Shallenberger and Mary, geb. Bonbright. His uncle, William Shadrack Shallenberger, was a member of Congress.

After attending school in Rochester and college in Beaver, he joined the Naval Academy in Annapolis as a cadet in 1877 , the physics department of which paid special attention to electricity. Here were his contemporaries Frank J. Sprague, Dr. Louis Duncan, WFC Hasson and Gilbert Wilkes. After graduation , he spent two years on the USS Lancaster in the Mediterranean, where he witnessed the bombing of Alexandria .

After returning to the United States in 1883, he resigned from the Navy the following year and devoted himself to electricity. The Union Switch and Signal Company, under the direction of George Westinghouse , was establishing an electrical lighting department at the time, and he had the opportunity to experiment with Lucien Gaulard and John Dixon Gibbs ' AC apparatus the following summer and fall Westinghous had brought from Europe to attend. Here he worked with William Stanley and Reginald Belfield on the commercial development of the AC system. The results then moved Westinghouse to found the Westinghouse Electric Company , of which Shallenberger became chief electrician, as did the following Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing , of which he became a member in late 1888.

When, at the end of April 1888, when he was investigating a new arc lamp, he dropped a coil spring, he observed that it was slowly rotating in the magnetic field. This observation led to the development of his alternating current meter - still in ampere-hours . (In Edison's DC system, the meter was a galvanic cell , the electrodes of which were weighed.)

In 1889 he visited some major European cities. On November 27, 1889, he married Mary Woolslair, with whom he had a son and a daughter.

In 1891 he had to give up his position as chief electrician due to health problems. Since Westinghouse did not want to give up his services, he remained as a consultant. He spent the following winters in Colorado and the summer months at home in Rochester, where he had a well-equipped laboratory.

In 1897 he founded the Colorado Electric Power Company and became its president.