Henry W. Seely

Henry W. Seely was a New York inventor credited with the first workable and patented electric flat iron. He developed his design in 1881 and received a United States patent in 1882, describing an iron with a resistance, preferably of carbon, placed inside close to its face and connected to an electric lighting circuit. In 1883 he and his partner Richard N. Dyer, Thomas Edison patent attorney, patented a different electric flat iron that used a layer of finely divided resistant conductor in the base and could be heated on an electrically warmed stand, so the iron did not have to stay plugged in. Seely kept only one third of the rights to his 1882 patent, assigning the rest to Samuel Insull and Dyer. In the early 1880s his signature appears as witness on more than a hundred patents, including some of Edison, and he continued to witness occasionally until 1892. His iron was not a commercial success; reliable details of his birth and later life are scarce.