William E. Sawyer

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William Edward Sawyer (* 1850 in Brunswick , Maine , † April 15, 1883 in New York City ) was an engineer and businessman in the field of early electrical engineering .

Around 1880 he made numerous useful and business-worthy inventions for the application areas of the then booming new industrial sector. The incandescent lamp developed by Sawyer was at that time competition for Thomas A. Edison's incandescent lamp. For posterity, his plans for a television-like electrical device are particularly interesting - an English Apparatus for rendering visible objects at a distance , which Sawyer first presented to witnesses in 1877 and described with technical sketches in Scientific American of June 12, 1880.

Professional path and technical developments

William E. Sawyer had worked first as a telegraph operator and then as a correspondent for the Boston Post and the Boston Daily Traveler in Washington, until the New York businessman Spencer D. Schuyler brought the 25-year-old to New York and his company in 1875 . For Schuyler and later with other business partners, Sawyer developed devices, systems and switching devices for almost all commercial areas of electricity. In 1880 he developed an incandescent lamp that aroused huge business interest. A total of 50 patents have been registered on Sawyer. The Scientific American and other magazines regularly reported on his work.

Construction plans for a television set

In October 1877, Sawyer invited various figures in the New York electrical industry to the offices of his electrical engineering company in Lower Manhattan . Sawyer presented construction plans for a device that properly combined most of the principles of television . In the description, Sawyer mentions an image carrier that should be composed of at least 10,000 individual Selenium pixels: “. . . this surface should be composed of at least 10,000 insulated Selenium points (...) " . He reports on his efforts to scan a light beam in a circular motion over the picture surface at such a high speed that the viewer would see a still picture due to the inertia of the human eye.

From 1880 onwards, Sawyer's invention was traded on an equal footing with other inventions relating to early television technology in Europe, where other inventors were already busy with technologies of "seeing by electricity".

Sawyer may have presented his plans to attract investors for further research. Sawyer's business correspondence shows that his professional life in those years was a constant series of negotiating meetings with financiers and lawyers. He ran a tight network of workshops in Lower Manhattan, where he worked on several technical projects at the same time.

Problems, murder charges and death

Sawyer was a difficult person. In October 1877 he was dismissed from the Spencer D. Schuylers company because of frequent drunkenness . A few years later his career came to an abrupt end. In 1881 he shot a neighbor in the street. Shortly before serving a prison sentence, Sawyer died in 1883 at the age of only 33.

Sawyer's patents in the following years

Because the patents registered on Sawyer were valuable after his death, his business partner Albon Man founded a new company in 1884 on both names, which got involved in a long and historically significant patent litigation against Thomas A. Edison. As a result, many documents relating to Sawyer and Man's business have survived.

Sawyer's filament lamp patents were later bought out by Westinghouse Corporation .

Publications

William Edward Sawyer: Electric lighting by incandescence, and its application to interior illumination. A practical treatise . New York: Van Nostrand, 1881.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Charles D. Wrege, Ronald G. Greenwood: William E. Sawyer and the Rise and Fall of America's First Incandescent Electric Light Company, 1878-1881 (PDF, 978 kB) at h-net.org
  2. ^ Light Inventor Honored . In: The New York Times . July 20, 1920. Retrieved April 16, 2009.
  3. ^ Harold C. Passer: The Electrical Manufacturers 1875-1900. A Study in Competition, Entrepreneurship, Technical Change, and Economic Growth. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953. p. 144-147.
  4. ^ Scientific American, June 12, 1880
  5. ↑ Heinrich Raatschen: The technical and cultural invention of television in the years 1877 - 1882. Dissertation, Dusseldorf, 2005
  6. ↑ Charles D. Wrege, Ronald G. Greenwood: William E. Sawyer and the Rise and Fall of America's First Incandescent Electric Light Company from 1878 to 1881. in: Business and Economic History 2d series vol. 13 (1984) p. 31-48. (PDF; 978 kB)
  7. ↑ The New York Times trial observer provides the details. New York Times, April 6, 1880 , April 7, 1880 , April 8, 1880 , April 27, 1880 , April 29, 1880 , May 1, 1880 , October 1, 1881
  8. ^ Edison Light Co. vs. US Electric Lighting Co. (1885-1892). Available online in the Thomas A. Edison Papers. Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey.
personal data
SURNAME Sawyer, William E.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Sawyer, William Edward
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American electrical engineer
DATE OF BIRTH 1850
PLACE OF BIRTH Brunswick , Maine
DATE OF DEATH April 15, 1883
Place of death New York City