Samuel Alfred Varley

Samuel Alfred Varley (1832 to 1921) was an electrical and telegraph engineer and inventor, the son of Cornelius Varley and the brother of the better known telegraph engineer Cromwell Varley. In 1852 he followed his brother into the Manchester workshops of the Electric Telegraph Company, and he later supervised the first field telegraphs used in the Crimean War, publishing influential papers on cable signalling. In 1861 he took over a London telegraph factory owned by his father. His best known work came in 1866, when he made the first self-excited dynamo, an invention reached at about the same time by William Siemens and Charles Wheatstone working independently; he applied for a patent, as did Siemens. He also devised compound winding, although his patents on it and on the dynamo lapsed before they became commercially valuable. In 1873 he read a paper on railway train intercommunication, describing a system fitted to the royal train of the London and North Western Railway, and in 1885 he received a gold medal for designing the first self-exciting dynamo. He became known as a vocal critic of electrical engineers' growing reliance on mathematical theory, and he died at Winchester on 4 August 1921.