Charles Grafton Page – The Father of the Circuit Breaker
Charles Grafton Page is considered the father of the modern circuit breaker. He was born to Captain Jere Lee Page and Lucy Lang Page in Salem, Massachusetts on January 25, 1812 and died in Washington DC on May 5, 1868. With eight siblings, four sisters and four brothers, it was a full and lively family. Although Page was educated by him as a doctor, he was fascinated with electricity from an early age. At nine years old, he tried to harness electricity by holding a shovel in the air during a storm while he was standing on the roof of his parents’ house. At ten he made an electrostatic machine to electrocute his friends. Page graduated from Harvard College in 1832 and from Harvard Medical School in 1836. Page published the first of more than 40 papers by him at age 22 on electromagnetic devices.
Even while practicing medicine, Page never stopped experimenting with electricity. He extensively experimented with electromagnetic induction. He built a device that he thought might have a use in the medical world in an early form of electroshock therapy. He continued to improve this device by increasing the input voltage of the low voltage battery, and named his device ‘The Dynamic Multiplier’. For his device to work, the electrical current had to be stopped and restarted over and over again. This led him to produce the first switches.
The first self-acting circuit breaker was invented by Page in 1836. On April 14, 1838, he received his first and most famous patent for “Improvement in Induction Coil Apparatus in Circuit Breakers.” Page continued to experiment with electricity throughout his life. His work earned him the respect of the scientific community both during and after his life. He was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2006. The Hall of Fame is located in Alexandria, Virginia, on the grounds of the US Patent and Trademark Office, which seems more appropriate for Page, since he was not only an inventor, but also a patent agent and patent examiner during his lifetime.
Page first became a patent examiner in 1842. He became chief patent examiner during this period, but left his position in 1852 to pursue a career as a patent agent, helping other inventors obtain patents for their inventions. In 1861 he returned once more to the Patent Office as a patent examiner at the start of Abraham Lincoln’s new administration. He continued in the Patent Office until his death in 1868.