Ernst Alexanderson

Ernst Fredrik Werner Alexanderson (1878 to 1975) was a Swedish-born electrical engineer who spent his career at General Electric in Schenectady, New York. Born in Uppsala and trained at the Royal Technical University in Stockholm, he joined General Electric in 1902 and early on invented a self-exciting alternator. From 1904 he designed high-frequency alternators as radio transmitter sources, one of which Reginald Fessenden used for voice and music broadcasts from Brant Rock in December 1906. His 200-kilowatt alternators carried transatlantic radio traffic and became the base of the long-wave network of the Radio Corporation of America, where he was first chief engineer. He later worked on television, radio facsimile and the amplidyne, received more than 340 United States patents and was president of the IRE in 1921.