If you enjoy alternating-current electricity in your home or business, and you get the power from “the grid,” paying the utility company for the amount you use, and if you can rely on the power from your electrical outlets being pretty consistent, and if you have any devices that use AC electric motors, you can thank a person who was born August 11, 1860 for all of it; he invented the things that make all that possible. But I’ll bet you’ve never heard of him.
I’m talking about Ottó Bláthy, who was born in Hungary in 1860. He learned machining in school, and got a job in the machine shop at the Hungarian Railway. Then when he was 23 he heard about Károly Zipernowsky — an inventor working at the Ganz Works on some of those new-fangled electrical thingamajigs. He was interested enough to quit his job and go work at the Ganz Works too, where his first task was to start learning about electricity, which hadn’t been taught in school. At least he started learning as much as there was to know.
Bláthy started with the Maxwell equations, which are the mathematical model describing how electrical and magnetic fields work. These equations were brand new at the time; James Maxwell published them just the year before Bláthy joined the Ganz Works. Electrical technology was sort of the artificial intelligence of the 1860s; a worldwide craze among, um, nerds. In any case, Bláthy was able to use the equations to invent a way to know what size magnetic coil you’d need for what you wanted to do. Two other researchers, Kapp and Hopkinson, published findings five years later detailing how to do the same thing, but there’s an excellent chance that Bláthy did it first — but as a 23-year-old newbie, didn’t think to publish anything.
From that point, Bláthy’s inventions began to get pretty technical. Along with two other Ganz colleagues he invented the “ZBD transformer” (“Bláthy” is the “B”), and the Ganz company started selling the world’s first commercial, efficient AC transformers in 1884. Ganz also built power plants, and Bláthy designed the turbo generators for the power-creation part of the grid, as well as the watt-hour meter for the power-usage part.
This was the same era that the Edison company, in the US, was working on electrical inventions, and in 1886 Bláthy visited them. He noticed that they were using a set of tables to determine the parameters of the electrical coils they built — they’d put together the tables by trial and error; simply building hundreds of coils with different parameters and trying them (this was Edison’s approach; massive trial and error). Bláthy calmly showed them they hadn’t needed to do all that work, and demonstrated how to derive the same (actually more accurate) tables mathematically. Then he left and never visited the US again. History has not recorded whether he rolled his eyes at the brute-force methods the Edison crew used.
In his spare time, Bláthy enjoyed chess, but not necessarily in the sense of “hey, how about a game.” His hobby was creating chess problems, particularly the kind known as “moremovers.” He published his chess problems, including one that’s still famous, where all the black pieces are still on the board and white has only the king and one pawn, but white wins. If you like that sort of thing, it’s called “grotesque chess” because the setup of a problem is almost (or entirely) impossible in a real game, but can be “solved” with legal moves. Real chess players are said to think many of these things are humorous; Bláthy apparently did too.
