William Stanley Jr.

William Stanley (1858 to 1916) was an American electrical engineer and inventor who built the first commercially practical alternating current transformer system. Born in Brooklyn, New York, he left Yale after part of a semester, worked for the inventor Hiram Maxim and for lamp makers, and in 1884 was engaged by George Westinghouse to develop a lamp manufacturing facility in Pittsburgh. He recognized that connecting induction coils in parallel rather than in series would make an alternating current distribution system self-regulating. In Great Barrington, Massachusetts, he built and wound the first transformers, and a system carrying 500 volts along Main Street and reducing it to 100 volts for lamps in the businesses of 25 subscribers was tried on 6 March 1886 and officially tested on 16 March 1886. In 1890 he left Westinghouse and formed the Stanley Manufacturing Company with John Kelly and Cummings Chesney, which focused on transformers until General Electric acquired it in 1903. He received the AIEE Edison Medal in 1912 and died in Great Barrington in 1916.