In 1879, while
Thomas Edison was struggling with his own incandescent globe,
Charles F. Brush was flipping the switch to his first commercial
set of electric arc lights in Cleveland's Public Square which
remained in service for 15 years.
"Brush lights",
as they came to be known, soon were lighting up city streets throughout
the world, earning the young inventor fame first and wealth soon
thereafter as the president of Brush Electric Co.
As the holder
of more than 100 patents, the founder of Brush Electric and later
Brush Laboratories still tops an inventors' hall of fame list
displayed at the University of Michigan, where he obtained his
bachelor's and master's degrees. Brush also held an honorary Ph.D
from Case Western Reserve University.
A Euclid,
Ohio, native, he began scientific tinkering as a Cleveland public
high school student in 1863. His first experiments with electricity
paid off when he obtained the patent for the arc light, the dynamo
(high-tension current) and a fundamental storage battery in the
late 1870's and mid-1880's.
In 1889, Thomson-Houston
Electric bought Brush Electric Co. and, in 1891, consolidated
with the Edison Electric Co. to form General Electric. Also, Brush
Electric Light & Power Co. merged with Cleveland Electric Illuminating
Co. and Brush's name disappeared from the utility field. Brush
spent the last 40 years of his life devoted to research on ether
and gravity. With an extremely refined apparatus of his design,
he demonstrated that certain kinds of matter, when allowed to
fall freely under the influence of gravity, fell faster than others
under identical conditions, thus proving the ratio of mass to
weight was not the same for all kinds of matter.
Interested
in the inventions of Dr. Carol Little, who extracted oxygen from
liquid air, he became the founder of the Linde Air Products Co.
in 1905, which merged in 1917 to become Union Carbide and Carbon
Company.
In 1921, Brush
helped his son, Charles, Jr., and Charles Baldwin Sawyer establish
the Brush Laboratories on the family property. It became a significant
research organization, specializing in the commercialization of
beryllium and the acoustic use of Rochelle salt crystals. The
crystal work was closely tied to the growing sound industry of
the day, particularly in motion pictures and radio. Sadly, the
younger Brush died in 1927 from blood poisoning from complications
of a blood transfusion he was giving to his daughter, who also
died of blood poisoning. Brush passed on in 1929 during a bout
of pneumonia, at the age of 80.
Brush Laboratories
became the Brush Beryllium Co. in 1931 under the leadership of
Charles Baldwin Sawyer. He and fellow scientist, Bengt Kjellgren,
developed a process of extracting beryllium from beryl ore by
thermal shock techniques.
The company's
sales of beryllium steadily grew through war and peacetime applications.
Beryllium contributed to the development of atomic energy and
high-speed aircraft. It was also used to form the heat shield
for the reentry vehicle in the Project Mercury manned space flights.
By 1960, the sales of beryllium metal, alloys, oxides and ceramics
quadrupled.
And the rest,
as they say, is history.
