HISTORY
OF
THE TRANSFORMER.
BY
F. UPPENBORN,
EDITOR OF THE “CENTRALBLATT FÜR ELEKTROTECHNIK,”
AND CHIEF OF THE ELECTRO-TECHNICAL TESTING STATION IN MUNICH.
TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN.
E. & F. N. SPON, 125, STRAND, LONDON.
NEW YORK: 12, CORTLANDT STREET.
1889.
PREFACE.
As of late the employment of alternating current transformers haslargely increased and become of great importance, indeed as they arecalled upon to play a striking part in electric lighting from centralstations, the author has thought a short notice of the development ofthis invention would possess some interest. This task appeared to be somuch the more pressing, as many distorted versions of the invention andits priority have found place in the technical journals.
The author has not let the reading of the large number of patentsdiscourage him, and hopes that the following plain and concisestatement of these researches will contribute towards the forming of acorrect judgment as to the services rendered by the several inventors.
HISTORY OF THE TRANSFORMER.
As we wish to write of those discoveries which led up to the inventionof the transformer, we must go back to a time, old as compared with themodern development of electrotechnics. For the starting-point of ourobservations we shall take Faraday, who, like Newton in mechanics, ledthe way in the domain of electricity, and whose name stands in the mostintimate relations with all inventions for the mechanical productionof the electric current, and therefore with the later development ofelectrotechnics.
1831.
The most important discovery for which we have to thank Faraday isthat of induction. This discovery was made by him in the year 1831,and intimated to the philosophical world in a paper read on the 24thNovember, 1831, appearing in the Transactions of the PhilosophicalSociety in the year 1832.
Faraday’s first induction apparatus consisted of two coils of wire, theone being slid over the other. As he was passing the current from abattery through one of these, he made the discovery that each time the[ 2]circuit of the coil was opened or closed an electromotive force wascreated in the second coil, which caused a short gush of current orinduction current to flow, provided the circuit of this coil wasclosed, as might be through a galvanometer. The peculiarity of thisinduced current was, that it only flowed in the second coil during thetime the current in the first coil took to reach its normal strengthafter closing the circuit, or on breaking the circuit during the timethe current took to decrease from its normal strength to zero.
This discovery undoubtedly belongs to the domain of the transformer,induction being the physical precedent upon which the transformer isbased; indeed, a transformer is in principle an induction apparatus.