Location Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States Regions Great Lakes, Northeastern US Gender Male
Edwin L. Wiegand, a self-taught engineer from Pittsburgh, PA, had always shown an intense curiosity in electrical conductivity. In his makeshift laboratory off his family’s dining room, Wiegand experimented with ways to encapsulate the fragile and sometimes dangerous “open coil” heat technology of the time in a dielectric. This led to his
groundbreaking patent in 1915 of a resistance-heating element embedded in an insulating refractory and enclosed in a metal sheath. On this technology, he founded Chromalox in 1917 and began producing the strip heater for what would become the modern electric clothes iron.
