Background
Zenobe Gramme was born on April 4, 1826, in Jehay-bodegnée, Liege, Belgium. He was the sixth child of Mathieu-Joseph Gramme, a clerk in the tax department.
Belgium
Zénobe Gramme
Belgium
Zénobe Gramme
Belgium
Zénobe Gramme
France
Gramme was awarded the Volta Prize by Louis Napoleon in 1888.
Belgium
Gramme was awarded the Order of Leopold I of Belgium in 1898.
France
Gramme was awarded the Legion of Honour in 1877.
France
Gramme was awarded the Volta Prize by Louis Napoleon in 1888.
Belgium
Gramme was awarded the Order of Leopold I of Belgium in 1898.
France
Gramme was awarded the Legion of Honour in 1877.
Belgium
Zénobe Gramme
Belgium
Zénobe Gramme
France
Hippolyte Fontaine
France
Marcel Deprez
France
Arsène d’ Arsonval
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Hypoth%C3%A8ses-Scientifiques-%C3%89mises-En-1900/dp/0341206555/?tag=prabook0b-20
1900
inventor scientist electrical engineer
Zenobe Gramme was born on April 4, 1826, in Jehay-bodegnée, Liege, Belgium. He was the sixth child of Mathieu-Joseph Gramme, a clerk in the tax department.
Gramme showed no ability as a student but did not lack ingenuity and manual dexterity. He left school at an early age.
After leaving school Gramme became a joiner, practicing this trade in the small town of Hannut until he was twenty-two years old. He then moved with his family to Liège, where he remained until 1855. After visiting Brussels, Paris, Lyons, and Marseilles, he settled in Paris as a banister maker.
Shortly after he came to Paris, Gramme began to work as a model maker in a firm that specialized in the manufacture of electrical apparatus. This served as his apprenticeship in technology. By 1867 he had become interested in building an improved apparatus for producing alternating current. He was appalled by the dirt surrounding the batteries used to produce direct current, and by 1869 he had built a successful direct-current dynamo, drawing on the work of Pacinotti and other earlier physicists who had theorized autoexcitation in revolving machines. Gramme’s dynamno, used in metallurgy as well as in the production of electric light, depended upon a ring winding to hold the conductors in place on the surface of the revolving armature. Gramme was the first to give final form to the collector that derives direct current from the revolving armature, and he rapidly saw the possibility of inverting the function of the dynamo to use it as an electrical engine.
Gramme’s invention was presented to the Académie des Sciences by the physicist Jules Jamin at the meeting of 17 July 1871. It soon aroused the interest of scientific and industrial circles. And with the help of Marcel Deprez and Arsène d’ Arsonval, Gramme was able to accomplish the long-distance transmission of direct-current electricity. Their results were announced to the Academy on 2 December 1872.
Gramme became associated with Hippolyte Fontaine in the further development of his machines. In 1871 they opened a factory - the Société des Machines Magnéto-Électriques Gramme - which manufactured the Gramme ring, Gramme armature, and Gramme dynamo, among other things. The factory grew to great size and the owners prospered.
In 1901, following Gramme’s death, she published a manuscript that he had written in the last two years of his life, containing a number of hypotheses about electricity and magnetism - hypotheses that, unfortunately, most eloquently illustrate Gramme’s ignorance of contemporary science as well as his vivid imagination.
Zénobe Gramme was a well-known electrical engineer. He invented the Gramme machine, a type of direct current dynamo capable of generating smoother and much higher voltages than the dynamos known to that point. Gramme was awarded the Legion of Honour in 1877, the Volta Prize by Louis Napoleon in 1888, and the Order of Leopold I of Belgium in 1898.
Gramme died semiliterate, without having advanced his mathematical training much beyond the four basic operations of elementary arithmetic.
Gramme married Hortense Nysten, a dressmaker from Liège. Gramme’s wife died in 1890, and in 1891 he married Antonie Schentur, who was thirty-six years his junior.
