Founded in New Jersey by Edward Weston in 1888, the company's innovations included the Weston standard cell, the first accurate portable voltmeters and ammeters, the first portable lightmeter, and many other electrical developments.

The Robert W. Van Houten Library at the New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark, New Jersey, maintains a museum and library including the Weston archive.  The Weston Rare Book Room contains over 100 rare books and the Edward Weston Papers. Access is by appointment only, Monday thru Friday from 8:00am to 4:00pm

Edward Weston was an early contributor to the founding of the Newark Technical School, which eventually became NJIT.  Weston Hall at NJIT is named for him and for his son, Edward Faraday Weston, who was a trustee of the School, at that time known as the Newark College of Engineering.

The entry for Edward Weston in the New Jersey Inventors Hall of Fame.

A note on Weston lightmeters, with an interesting letter from Charles Mulhern, a former Weston employee (see note on the Mulhern collection below). This is part of the westonmaster.com site, dedicated to continuing the Weston exposure meter line.

Another site on Weston lightmeters, with a comprehensive model listing

The Weston Aerospace website has a short history of Edward Weston.  A British company, Weston Aerospace traces its roots back to 1921, when it was founded under the name British Sangamo Ltd.   In 1936 the company acquired the Weston Electrical Instrument Co. Ltd. of Surbiton, Surrey, the United Kingdom subsidiary of Edward Weston's US corporation.

Scientific instrument historians will find many items of interest at Humboldt State University's Robert A. Paselk Scientific Instrument Museum.  The on-line catalog includes a short biographical note on Weston and shows a number of instruments, each with a photograph and detailed description.

The Edward Weston Exhibit at the International Electrical Exposition, Philadelphia, 1884

The Edward Weston Laboratory - 1887 article in The Manufacturer and Builder Exhibit

Weston's success with his pioneering measuring instruments has perhaps obscured his early research into lighting equipment.  After emigrating to the US in 1870, Weston found a job in the electroplating industry, and made many improvements in the processes used.  He realized that a constant source of current was required for quality plating, and the batteries used at the time were not sufficient for the job.  After the first company he worked for went out of business, Weston had a short career as a photographer, but returned to the plating industry in 1872, opening a business in partnership with George G. Harris.  In 1873 he developed his first dynamo for electroplating, and by 1875 he had moved to New Jersey, in business for himself making dynamos.  One of Weston's dynamos, running electric arc lamps, was shown at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876, but it received little attention.  Shortly after this, Weston was contacted by Frederick Stevens, who offered Weston the opportunity to set up a dynamo division of his Steven, Roberts & Havell company.  In 1877 the division was organized as a separate company,  the Weston Dynamo Machine Company, in Newark, New Jersey.

Weston had first used a carbon arc lamp in his own shop in 1874, run by his plating dynamo, and he continued to research lighting equipment.  By 1877 he had made many developments in arc lighting and in 1878 he put an arc light on the Newark Fire Department's watchtower in the center of town.   Publicity from this led to an order from the city for lighting Military Park, and this was followed in 1879 by an installation in Boston's Forest Garden.  In 1880 the firm's name was changed to the Weston Electric Light Company, which became a leader in the supply of arc lighting systems, providing the lighting for the new Brooklyn Bridge when it opened in 1883.

Weston was also working on incandescent lamps; his background in chemistry served him well in developing filament materials.  On 26 September 1882 he was granted a patent on the Tamidine filament, a carbon material which gave a bulb life of up to 2000 hours, when other materials burned out after only a few hundred hours. Weston also took out patents on incandescent lamp seals and many other inventions in the lighting field, and by 1886 had been granted 186 patents (see below for some highlights). At that time he was 36 years old; he quit the electric lighting business and started his research on measuring instruments. In April 1888 the Weston Electrical Instrument Company was chartered in Newark, his fourth and last company.

The image to the left shows three Weston incandescent lamps made in the 1880s.  The two smaller ones have Tamidine filaments.  These lamps, part of the Dr. Hugh Hicks collection, were photographed by Tim Tromp in 1999.

For much more information on early incandescent bulb lighting technology, see Tim's excellent Antique Light Bulb website.

M E A S U R I N G   I N V I S I B L E S

In 1938 the Weston Electrical Instrument Corporation
published a history of the company's first 50 years, titled:

Measuring Invisibles
The Fifty-Year Record of the World's
Largest Manufacturer of
Electrical Measuring Instruments

The information below is reproduced from page 15 of the book.

(Note: When this was written in 1938, David O. Woodbury's
biography of Weston had not yet been published)

No biographer has yet chosen to tell the story of Edward Weston’s life and his contributions to electrical science. Like that of many other great inventors his work remains buried in the papers and reports and patents of the 19th century, unknown to a public which for years has read of the careers and findings of such men as Fulton, Marconi, Edison, Westinghouse and the Wright brothers. And no attempt has been made in these pages to do more than sketch in the outline of Weston’s life, suggesting his accomplishments rather than fully describing them for the sake of future historians of this country’s inventions and inventors. But for those who are interested in scientific pioneers, the following list of 25 Weston achievements will serve to show the originality of the man whose name now appears on 309 patents in the United States Patent Office.

Edward Weston was the man who . . .