Background
Stanley was born November 28, 1858 in Brooklyn, New York, United States, the son of William Stanley and Elizabeth A. Parsons Stanley. He was a descendant of John Stanley who arrived in Boston in 1634.
Stanley was born November 28, 1858 in Brooklyn, New York, United States, the son of William Stanley and Elizabeth A. Parsons Stanley. He was a descendant of John Stanley who arrived in Boston in 1634.
He was educated in the schools of Great Barrington, under private tutors in Englewood, New Jersey, which was his home during most of his boyhood, and at Williston Academy, Easthampton, Massachussets. At seventeen he entered Yale College with the class of 1881.
The pre-law classical course, however, so irked him that he left in three months, went to New York, and obtained a job with a manufacturer of telegraphic apparatus. A while later, with money borrowed from his father, he purchased a partnership in a nickel-plating business and for a little more than a year did a thriving business.
About 1880 he gave it up to become research assistant to Hiram Stevens Maxim in the United States Electric Lighting Company in New York. When the company purchased the Western Arc Light Company, he became assistant to Edward Weston and thus gained in two years an invaluable experience in both incandescent and arc electric lighting.
In 1885 he accepted the position of chief engineer of the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, contracting at the same time to undertake certain investigations which were to be taken up as business enterprises by Westinghouse if successful. During his first year he devised the multiple system of alternating current distribution together with its equipment (patent No. 372, 942), but Westinghouse refused to finance its development until Stanley at his own expense had put the system into regular commercial service in Great Barrington, installing it in several stores. Thereupon in the fall of 1886 Westinghouse financed the installation of a similar plant at Buffalo, New York.
In 1888 Stanley resigned his position of chief engineer, continuing, however, as a general consultant; in 1890 he severed this connection and established in Pittsfield, Massachussets, the Stanley Laboratory Company and the Stanley Electric Manufacturing Company in association with C. C. Chesney and J. F. Kelly.
The partners together worked out the famous "S. K. C. " system of long-distance transmission of alternating current from the inductor type of generator, and in 1894 put into operation a plant in which they had installed equipment of their own manufacture to supply electric power to textile mills at Housatonic and Great Barrington. In 1905, after directing the affairs of his company for eleven years, Stanley sold it to the General Electric Company.
He died in Great Barrington, Massachusetts on May 14, 1916.
William Stanley made his first invention for the Swan Electric Light Company, namely, he perfected method of exhausting incandescent lamp bulbs. Later he established his own research laboratory, where was engaged in experimental work on storage batteries, on the manufacture of incandescent lamps, and on other electrical problems, obtaining three patents in these fields. Stanley also established the Stanley Laboratory Company and the Stanley Electric Manufacturing Company in Pittsfield, Massachussets. For his alternating-current system of long-distance transmission of electrical energy he was awarded the Edison Medal in 1912 by the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, of which he served as a vice-president from 1898 to 1900.
He married Lila Courtney Wetmore of Englewood on December 22, 1884, and at the time of his death in Great Barrington was survived by his widow and nine children. In 1935, their son, Harold Stanley, went on to found the modern day financial firm of Morgan Stanley with J. P. Morgan's grandson, Henry Sturgis Morgan.
