Origins
When the bow collector was first conceived by German inventor Ernst Werner von Siemens in the late 1880s, American inventor Frank J. Sprague of Virginia had just patented his trolley pole system of current collection from an overhead wire. To avoid contravening this patent, the Siemens company was forced to design its own, unique form of current collection, namely the bow collector. The bow collector was first used by the Siemens electric company in its early electric tramcars in either the late 1880s or early 1890s. The Hobart electric tramway system - the first of its kind in the Southern Hemisphere, opened in 1893 - used Siemens cars with very early bow collectors. Many other continental European and some English tramway systems also used this method.
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