IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - March/April 2016 - 81

history

JohnL.
L. Sprague
Sprague
John

Frank J. Sprague invents
the constant-speed dc electric motor

ON A MISERABLY COLD SPRING
day in 1998, it became necessary to
clean out a little-used storage barn in
Williamstown, Massachusetts, so that
it could be sold. The barn was part of
the estate of Robert C. Sprague, who had
died in 1991. Although the winter snow
was mostly gone, a misty drizzle made
the muddy walk down to the barn's entrance slippery and treacherous. Once
used to house riding horses, the stalls
were long gone and the building was
almost completely filled with rotting
wet hay and broken pieces of equipment, along with seemingly useless files
that once belonged to electrical inventor
Frank Julian Sprague, Robert's father.
The inventor had died in 1934, nearly 60
years before his son, and it seemed impossible that the barn could still hold anything of value. The building was sagging,
and, once inside, broken light bulbs and
wooden supports from Frank Sprague's
failed late 1920s programmable electric sign business made moving around
nearly impossible and dangerous. With
its stagnant hay and years of collected
rodent droppings, the space reeked, and
it seemed best to get a front loader, empty
out the structure, take the contents to the
dump, and hope for a buyer who could
see more value than was apparent.
However, over in the far southeast corner there was a small room with a broken
door, which contained a table covered
with the remnants of a metal lathe and
miscellaneous, mostly unrecognizable,

The "History" column in the November/December 2015 issue of IEEE Power
& Energy Magazine was about the remarkable life and career of Frank Julian
Sprague, the accomplished inventor and electrical engineer. That article, authored by Frank's grandson, John L. Sprague, focused on Sprague's multiple
unit control system, still in wide use today, chiefly in railway applications. This
issue's article, also authored by John L. Sprague, delves even deeper into Frank
Sprague's career, centering on his pioneering work on dc motors. His inventions, still in use, include constant-speed motors, which are nonsparking and
fully self-regulating under changing load conditions, and the design of advanced railway motor trucks.
Born in 1930, John L. Sprague holds an A.B. degree in chemistry from
Princeton University and a Ph.D. degree in chemistry from Stanford University. He served as a line officer in the U.S. Navy during the Korean War, including two years in naval electronics. He joined the Sprague Electric Company
in 1959 as a research scientist and retired as CEO in 1987. Since then, Sprague
has headed a small consulting firm, John L. Sprague Associates, now headquartered in Williamstown, Massachusetts. John, an IEEE Life Member, has
authored or coauthored more than 20 articles, primarily in technical journals,
and holds six U.S. and three foreign patents. He coauthored "A Frank Sprague
Triumph: The Electrification of Grand Central Terminal," which appeared in
the "History" column of the January/February 2013 issue of this magazine.
John's first book, Revitalizing U.S. Electronics: Lessons from Japan, was published by Butterworth-Heinemann in 1993. He edited The Birth of Electric
Traction, the Extraordinary Life and Times of Inventor Frank Julian Sprague,
a book written by Frank Rowsome and published in 2014 by the IEEE History
Center Press. More recently, John authored Sprague Electric, An Electronics
Giant's Rise, Fall, and Life After Death, a book published this past April by
the IEEE History Center Press.
We are honored and pleased to welcome John Sprague back as our guest
"History" author for this issue of IEEE Power & Energy Magazine.

-Carl Sulzberger
Associate Editor, History

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MPE.2015.2501085
Date of publication: 18 February 2016

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