Among the giants: Elihu Thomson: Man of many facets: This foremost inventor and industrialist also directed a corporate engineering and research department and was president of MIT

When he was still a high-school student. Elihu Thomson wrote, “There is scarcely a day passing, on which some new use for electricity is not discovered. It seems destined to become at some future time the means of obtaining light, heat, and mechanical force.” In making this remark, Thomson could well have been anticipating his own future, for few men discovered more new uses for electricity than he. Along with Thomas A. Edison, George Westinghouse, and Charles Brush, Thomson helped create the first electric light and power systems. By the time of his death in 1937, he had come to be considered by the engineering profession as “indisputably the dean of American electrical engineers.”