William Joseph Hammer

William Joseph Hammer

William Joseph Hammer (born February 26, 1858 in Cressona , Schuylkill County , † March 24, 1934 ) was an American engineer.

Live and act

William Joseph Hammer began his career in 1878 as assistant chemist Edward Weston in Newark, New Jersey , at the Weston Malleable Nickel Company . During a visit to Thomas Alva Edison's laboratory in Menlo Park in December 1879, he secured a job as a laboratory assistant. He was engaged in the development of phonographs, telephones and mainly incandescent lamps . In 1880 he became chief engineer at Edison Lamp Works . In 1881 he was sent to London to the English Electric Light Company , where he set up the first central power supply for 3000 lamps on the Holborn Viaduct (see Holborn Viaduct station ) for demonstration purposes. He also prepared the electrical exhibition at Crystal Palace (1882).

Hammer discovered the Hammer's Phantom Shadow (1882?), Which became known as the Edison effect and later as the Edison-Richardson effect when the light bulb was patented in 1883 . In 1883 he took over the post as chief engineer of the German Edison Society (later AEG ) in Berlin . He set up several factories in the German Empire and initiated dynamo production in Charlottenburg. Here he also invented a flashing light.

In the spring of 1884 Hammer returned to the United States and became chief inspector of the central stations of the parent company Edison Electric Light Company . From 1886 to 1887 he was the managing director and chief engineer of the Boston Edison Electric Illuminating Company . In 1888, Hammer worked as a freelance engineer overseeing the completion of what was then the largest isolated electrical lighting system at the Ponce de Leon Hotel in St. Augustine, Florida . That year he was also elected as a consulting engineer for the Centennial Exposition Cincinnati . Edison selected him as his personal representative for the Paris World's Fair of 1889. During the exhibition, Hammer went on a balloon flight over France with Doctors Wells and Abbott Lawrence Rotch . After his return he ran an independent consultancy in New York City from 1890 to 1925 , where he also acted as an expert in patent disputes. In 1894 he married Alice Maud White († 1906) in Cleveland with whom he had a daughter.

In 1902, when Pierre and Marie Curie visited Paris, Hammer had received a sample of radium with which he was experimenting. He made radium powder and bright paints for coating clocks and instruments. In the summer of 1903 he used it to treat a tumor on his hand and supplied hospitals with radioactive water. During experiments with selenium , he also developed selenium cells and applications for them.

His passion was aviation.

Publications

• Radium, and other radio-active substances: polonium, actinium, and thorium . New York / London 1903, (online) .

literature

• William J. Hammer. Consulting Electrical Engineer . PDF .

Individual evidence

1. ^ Promoting Edison's Lamp