Louis Bell was born December 5, 1864, in the small village of
Chester, New Hampshire, the youngest child of Louis Bell (Sr.) and Mary Anne (Mollie) Persis Bouton. His father was a New Hampshire lawyer who died in 1865 while serving as a
Union Army colonel at the
battle of Fort Fisher during the
American Civil War. His mother died shortly thereafter, leaving Louis Bell and his older sister Marion to be raised by their grandmother, Lucy G. Bell née Smith, the widow of prominent New Hampshire politician
Samuel Bell. An intelligent boy, Bell was an avid reader, and his studies were encouraged by his grandmother. At the age of ten he attended the nearby
Northwood Academy. Two years later, Bell was sent to be educated at
Phillips Exeter Academy, and he matriculated to
Dartmouth College in 1880. There he studied physics and chemistry, among other subjects, while taking an interest in astronomy. He graduated with an A.B. in 1884, after winning final honors in physics, honorable mention in English, and serving as associate editor of
The Dartmouth. After remaining a year at Dartmouth as a post-graduate, he spent three years in residence at
Johns Hopkins University studying physics and chemistry under
Henry A. Rowland. Bell was awarded a Ph.D. in 1888 with a thesis titled
On the Absolute Wave-length of Light. He next joined the staff of
Purdue University as a professor seated in the newly established
chair of
applied electricity. While there he organized the instruction as head of the newly founded
school of electrical engineering. Resigning at the end of the year, he joined the consulting firm of Bliss and Bell. In 1890, he became editor of
Electrical World, a weekly journal owned by the W. J. Johnston company. Bell would maintain a literary connection with the publication for the remainder of this life. In 1892, he was hired as chief engineer for the power transmission department of the
General Electric company. Bell would design some of the nation's first
polyphase power transmission plants. The same year, he published
The Electric Railway in collaboration with
Oscar T. Crosby. During 1893, he supervised the installation of the nation's first
three-phase generators at the Redlands Power Plant in
Mill Creek, California. He went on to work on the
Folsom Powerhouse, which became the most powerful in the world at that time. Using a system Bell designed, this generator transmitted a now-standard
60 Hz frequency alternating current over long-distance lines, to
Sacramento in 1895. It was the first facility in the nation to do this. He married Sarah Gross Hemenway in 1893. Sarah was a Dartmouth alumni from the class of 1884. They would have one son, Louis Hemenway Bell. Bell became a
Boston engineering consultant in 1895, and he remained in this job for the rest of his life. Initially his focus was on power transmission, but later he specialized in the engineering of illumination. He lectured at both
Harvard and the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1897, he authored
Electric Power Transmission, which became a standard textbook on the subject for several years. During the
Spanish–American War (1898), Bell served as a technical officer in the Volunteer Electrical Corps. His
Art of Illumination was published in 1902 and became a standard work on the topic. He contributed articles on electric power transmission and
electric motors to the 10th and 11th editions of
Encyclopædia Britannica. In 1908, Bell served as the third president of the
Illuminating Engineering Society. During
World War I, he was a member of the advisory committee for the
Council of National Defense. For a period of ten years he served as vice president of the Illuminating Engineering Society of Great Britain. During the early days of the automobile, he worked on headlights and the development of headlight lenses. Bell retained an interest in
astronomy for much of his life, and in 1922 he authored
The Telescope. He was known to be a good shot and had a life-long love of the outdoors. He died June 14, 1923. An honorary Doctorate of Science was awarded to him by Dartmouth College shortly after his death. ==Bibliography==