A self-taught inventor 

A joiner who became an ingenious inventor

Originally from the Liège region, Zénobe Gramme started out as a joiner. In 1860, he was hired as a model maker by L’Alliance in Paris, a company specialising in electrical equipment. His job involved making wooden parts for machines. It was against this stimulating technical backdrop that he began to take an interest in electricity and started to suggest improvements for the company’s products. In 1869, he filed a patent for the dynamo, then called the “Gramme” dynamo.

The dynamo: a significant invention

The Franco-Prussian War and Paris’ municipal authorities delayed the presentation of the dynamo to the French Academy of Sciences, which did not happen until 1871. That same year, Gramme joined forces with engineer Hippolyte Fontaine to set up the Société des machines magnéto-électriques Gramme in Paris, dedicated to the production of his invention.

Initially used to light factories and public spaces, the dynamo generated electricity… but it could also act as a motor. Its compact size meant that it could be installed in small workshops, thus contributing to the mechanisation of many cottage industries.

At the first International Exposition of Electricity in Paris in 1881, the dynamo was a huge success: more than 10,000 of them had been produced by the end of the 19th century. Gramme sold his patents abroad, where other companies began to manufacture dynamos.

An enlightened autodidact

Zénobe Gramme did not have much of an educational background in physics at all. However, his dynamo is based on the laws of electromagnetism discovered by Ørsted, Ampère and Faraday. At one conference, he humbly explained: “If I had needed to know all of that, I would never have invented it.”