Ányos Istvân Jedlik

Born Jan. 11, 1800, in Simö, now Zemno, Slovakia; died Dec. 13, 1895, in Győr. Hungarian scientist and inventor in electrical engineering. Member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (1858). Son of a peasant.

After graduating from a Benedictine lycée in Győr, Jedlik became a teacher in a Gymnasium. In 1840 he became a professor of physics at the University of Pest. He constructed the first model of a rotating electric motor (1827–28) and was the first to discover the principle of self-excitation, which he used in the multidisk unipolar generator he built in 1861. He invented a device that was the prototype of the capacitance voltage multiplier; the invention received a medal at the Vienna World’s Fair in 1873, but it was never produced. Jedlik improved the design of voltaic cells and storage batteries, and he built a precision dividing machine. A number of his works dealt with optics and other areas of physics.