James Wimshurst

James Wimshurst (1832 to 1903) was an English inventor, engineer and shipwright whose refinements to the electrostatic generator led to it becoming widely known as the Wimshurst machine, although he never patented his machines. Born in Poplar, East London, the son of the shipbuilder Henry Wimshurst, he was apprenticed at the Thames Ironworks until 1853, later worked at the Liverpool Underwriters Registry and in 1874 joined the Board of Trade as chief shipwright surveyor at Lloyds. In his spare time he invented a distinctive vacuum pump, a device to show ship stability and methods of connecting lighthouses electrically to the mainland. From 1878 he experimented with influence machines, improving those of Nicholson, Carré and Holtz, and developed a duplex machine with two disks turning in opposite directions and a cylindrical machine in 1882. By 1896 his multiple-disk machines served as generators of Roentgen rays for radiography and electrotherapy, and he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1898.