Edward Weston

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The engineer who made electricity measurable in the field, with the first accurate portable direct-reading meters and a cell stable enough to calibrate them.

He did not set out to sell instruments. He was working on dynamos and found the available meters too clumsy and slow for his own experiments, so he built better ones - and they worked well enough that in 1888 he abandoned everything else. The list of what he had to invent to get there is the real story: permanent magnets that stayed permanent, conductors that ignored temperature, springs with low resistance and no magnetism, and pointer damping from Foucault's eddy currents. His 1893 cell then served as the international standard for electromotive force from 1911 until 1990, which means the volt was defined by a wet chemical cell for most of the twentieth century. An industry cannot be billed, tuned or trusted until it can be measured, and this is the man who closed that gap.

Also known as: weston, weston cell, weston standard cell, voltmeter

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