WILLIAM LEROY EMMET
   (1859-1941)

Both as a midshipman at the U.S. Naval Academy, and as a cadet on board the U.S.S. "Essex," Emmet's impatience with discipline and convention suggested that a career as a naval officer was not his intended niche. Accepting an honorable discharge in 1883, he tried his hand in series of other trades - architect, clerk, accountant - with a similar lack of success. He landed in the post of laborer, at salary of $7 per week, on the night shift of the United States Illuminating Company.

It proved the opportunity he had needed. Through on-the-job experience and self-directed study, he supplemented the knowledge of electricity he had gained in his Naval Academy courses. Applying that knowledge to some problems that cropped up in the factory, he gained the self-confidence that he had up to that point lacked. In 1887, he talked his way onto the staff of Frank Sprague, a contemporary of his at the Naval Academy who was building a career as the outstanding American pioneer in applying electricity to street railways.

Emmet moved onward through a succession of posts which gained him the status of full-fledged electrical engineer. Joining Edison General Electric not long before the merger that created GE, he came to Schenectady in 1892. There he was to spend the rest of his career, and score his greatest engineering triumphs.

His first major project for GE was the design of hydroelectric generators for the Niagara falls project. His success at this task established his technical reputation. After consulting engineer Charles G. Curtis brought GE his steam turbine concepts in 1897, serious development difficulties were encountered. Emmet took up the project after his return from a temporary stint of naval duty in the Spanish American War. He contributed materially to the success of some of the early Curtis turbines. But his major role in turbine development was to recognize that making a practical turbine with the tools and materials available in the first decade of the twentieth century, and scaling that turbine up to a useful rating of 5000 kilowatts, required a radical design change. Accordingly, he proposed mounting the turbine shaft vertically, allowing the turbine to spin like a top. This design proved the key to GE's early domination of the turbine field.

A genial, generous bachelor - "Uncle Bill" to his many friends - Emmet had many interests besides his work: curling, skiing, fishing, and astronomy, for example. But his main role in life was that of a tireless technical entrepreneur, constantly pushing forward advanced ideas. His perseverance could irritate more conservative colleagues. "No one would have called him a patient man," his contemporary Willis R. Whitney wrote of him

     
      but persistence was almost personified in him. He continually battled
      against himself and against deficiency in other men and materials. He
      would weepingly condemn himself forever, because of some slip of a
      golf stick; but he would loan money to almost anyone without critical 
      feelings...he never hesitated to 'stick his neck out,' whether it was
      about the structure of the moon, the special theories of President 
      Wilson, his own handicap at golf, the economy of steam generation, or
      some vagary of ice-curling, or salmon fishing, or moose hunting. 

Emmet's many successes testified to the soundness of the judgment that he so stubbornly defended. He pioneered the concept of electric drive for ships, and led the development project which proved it out. He initiated valuable work on gearing for turbines. And even where not successful, he showed an admirable combination of resourcefulness and daring. This comes through most clearly in his advocacy of the mercury vapor turbine. This idea for increasing the efficiency of electric power generation was never destined to become sufficiently economical to displace the steam turbine. But the technical virtuosity shown in Emmet's attack on the problem, and the energy he showed in pursuing it even when, in his eighties, he could have rested on his well-earned laurels, are characteristic of his impatient advocacy of unorthodox technical advance.

Return

Return