Background
He was born at Boscawen, New Hampshire.
inventor pioneer electrical engineer
He was born at Boscawen, New Hampshire.
Farmer was a member to the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, later known as the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. He received his schooling at Phillips Academy and Dartmouth College. He was a pioneer telegraph operator. He constructed and maintained the telegraph lines of Massachusetts.
He later became a superintendent of a telegraph company.
Farmer investigated multiple telegraphy. He successfully demonstrated duplex telegraphy between New York and Philadelphia in 1856 (Conot, p29).
Farmer also investigated telluric currents. In 1847, Farmer constructed and exhibited in public what he called “an electro-magnetic locomotive, and with forty-eight pint cup cells of Grove nitric acid battery drew a little car carrying two passengers on a track a foot and a half wide".
Farmer later fabricated a process for electroplating aluminum.
At Boston in 1851, he constructed an electric fire-alarm service with William Francis Channing. He invented several forms of the incandescent electric light. Farmer, in competition with Charles Wheatstone (1867).
Carl Wilhelm Siemens.
Ernst Werner von Siemens. And Carl Heinrich von Siemens (1867).
Ladd (1867). And Zénobe Gramme (1871), co-conceived the self-exciting dynamo in 1859, and constructed one in 1860.
He built a platinum filament incandescent light in 1859 (Conot, p120). At the age of 39 while living in Salem, Massachusetts, he lit the parlor of his home at 11 Pearl Street with incandescent lamps, the first house in the world to be lit by electricity.
He was a co-inventor of the self-exciting dynamo, an electric generator using electromagnets for the field which are energized by the generator output, in 1866 (Derry & Williams, p614). In 1868, with the Farmer dynamo, Farmer lit a house in Massachusetts.
He also patented an early lightbulb (which was later bought by Thomas Edison).
Edison used the Wallace-Farmer 8 horsepower (60 kW) dynamo to power his early electric light demonstrations (Jonnes, p47,54, Josephson 176-186). Farmer served as a teacher for a time. Farmer died at the World"s Columbian Exposition.
As a result he failed to carry his ideas to commercial success.
Patents
United States. Patent 17,355
United States. Patent 21,492
{{United States patent|123456|link text}}, "Method of Sending And Receiving Messages Simultaneously Over the Same Wire". February 16, 1875. Websites
Boscawen New Hampshire Inventor, Professor
Moses Gerrish Farmer (1820-1893). Cowhampshire.blogharbor, New Hampshire History, Genealogy, Photography and Humor.
Moses G. Farmer, Eliot"s Inventor.
Moses Gerrish Farmer. California Digital Library record (via Google).