![]() Back in Wales, the popular media occasionally remembers Grove in lists of the principality’s most famous sons, and with a certain amount of both poetic and scientific license dub him ‘the Welsh Tesla’. While the laurels for the invention of the early photographic process called the daguerreotype inevitably go to the Frenchman that lent his name to it – Louis Daguerre – few, if any are aware that It was Grove’s pioneering work (in collaboration with English amateur scientist and cigar entrepreneur John Gassiot) that paved the way for both the daguerreotype and its competing ‘multiple discovery’ technology the calotype or ‘talbotype’, invented by William Fox Talbot. And yet hardly anyone unfamiliar with the history of 19 th century physics will know the name of William Robert Grove, the Welsh scientist whose invention of the incandescent electric light predated Edison’s co-option of an established technology. When it comes to the marquee names in science and engineering, it’s a safe bet that most will have heard that of Thomas Edison, the American inventor commonly supposed to have invented the light bulb.
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