Ernst F. W. Alexanderson

Ernst Frederick Werner Alexanderson was a Swedish American electrical engineer and inventor, born in Sweden in 1878 and active in the United States until his death in 1975, whose work at General Electric shaped the earliest years of radio and television technology. His best known invention, the Alexanderson alternator, was a high frequency generator that served as a practical longwave radio transmitter from the first decade of the twentieth century into the 1930s, and it carried some of the first transatlantic radio transmissions. Alexanderson also developed the amplidyne, a direct current amplifier later used in industrial and military control systems including applications during the Second World War. Beyond radio, he contributed to early television development, and one of the first television broadcasts received in the United States, in 1927, was picked up at his own home near the General Electric plant in Schenectady, New York. His career spanned the shift from wireless telegraphy to broadcast radio to early mechanical television, making him one of the formative engineering figures of American media technology in the first half of the twentieth century.