Charles Hesterman Merz

Charles Hesterman Merz (1874 to 1940) was a British electrical engineer from Gateshead who pioneered high-voltage three-phase alternating-current power distribution in the United Kingdom. After an apprenticeship with the Newcastle-upon-Tyne Electric Supply Company and early posts in London, Croydon and Cork, he set up a consulting practice in 1899 that became Merz and McLellan. His Neptune Bank scheme near Newcastle, opened in 1901, was the first three-phase electricity supply system in Great Britain, and his regional network on Tyneside became the model for the later National Grid. He advised on the electrification of the Tyneside lines of the North Eastern Railway and on the railway system of Melbourne, and he argued for a unified national supply, which fed into the Williamson Report of 1918 and the Electricity Supply Act of 1926. He was killed with two of his children by an enemy bomb in London in October 1940.