Henry Wilde (engineer)

Henry Wilde (engineer)

Henry Wilde (1833 – 28 March 1919) was a wealthy individual from Manchester, England who used his self-made fortune to indulge his interest in electrical engineering. He invented the dynamo-electric machine, or self-energising dynamo, an invention for which Werner von Siemens is more usually credited and, in fact, discovered independently. At any rate, Wilde was the first to publish, his paper was communicated to the Royal Society by Michael Faraday in 1866. The self-energising dynamo replaces the permanent magnets of previous designs with electro-magnets and in so doing achieved an enormous increase in power. The machine was considered remarkable at the time, especially since Wilde was fond of spectacular demonstrations, such as the ability of his machine to cause iron bars to melt.