Swampscott Town Hall

Elihu Thomson House
National Register of Historic Places
National Historic Landmark
Historic District Contributing Property
	The building in 2006
location	Swampscott , Massachusetts , United States
Coordinates	42 ° 28 '11.2 " N , 70 ° 55' 9.8" W Coordinates: 42 ° 28 '11.2 " N , 70 ° 55' 9.8" W.
Built	1889
Architectural style	Georgian Revival
NRHP number	76002002
Data
The NRHP added	7th January 1976
Declared as an NHL	7th January 1976
Declared as CP	July 1, 2002

The Swampscott Town Hall (formerly Elihu Thomson House ) is a historic building in Swampscott in the state of Massachusetts of the United States . Erected in the late 19th century as a home for the American inventor and co-founder of General Electric Elihu Thomson , the structure was entered as a National Historic Landmark in the National Register of Historic Places in 1976. Since 2002 it has also been a contributing property to the Olmsted Subdivision Historic District .

architecture

The brick building in the style of the Georgian Revival is two and a half stories high. On the flat hipped roof there is a terrace, which is delimited with an ornate balustrade . The roof is broken through on each of the four sides of the building by two dormers with a gable roof . The main entrance is in the Palladian style and has a semicircular portico supported by columns . A porch leads to a side entrance. The rear of the house is connected to a two and a half storey high shed via a closed path .

In addition to his actual office in nearby Lynn , Elihu Thomson also used the house to work and therefore set up a research laboratory on the top floor of the coach house. He also had a small, no longer existing observatory built on his property , which he used for his astronomical observations for 35 years. For his children he built a garden railway and his own laboratory in the attic of the main house.

In 1944 the Thomson family transferred the building to the city of Swampscott, which left it structurally almost unchanged and has been using it for its own purposes ever since.

Historical meaning

Born in 1853, Elihu Thomson came to the United States in 1857 with his father, who had become unemployed in England, and his mother, where they settled in Philadelphia in 1858 . His father was a mechanic , which sparked Elihu's interest in the subject. Already in his early childhood he occupied himself with model making and chemical experiments and graduated from the high school in Philadelphia with such an excellent degree that he was offered an apprenticeship there when he left the school in 1870, which he accepted.

At high school, he befriended his colleague Edwin J. Houston , with whom he conducted experiments on electricity . In 1879, investors expressed interest in the gas discharge tube lighting he had developed , which they both used to set up a production company in New Britain, Connecticut , in 1880 . But sales were low, which is why new investors bought the company in 1882 and renamed the Thomson-Houston Electric Company .

From 1882 onwards, Thomson, who preferred to research and develop rather than run a company, developed an incandescent lighting system, AC motors , equipment for electrified railways and other electricity-powered devices, making the Thomson-Houston Electric Company one of the leading manufacturers of electronic devices in the 1890s USA counted. In 1892 the company was merged with the Edison General Electric Company to form General Electric . Thomson turned down the new management's request to move to Schenectady , instead staying in Lynn, working remotely as a consultant for General Electric.