United States Electric Lighting Company
former American electric and lightbulb company
The United States Electric Lighting Company was an American electric and lightbulb company founded in 1878 by Sir Hiram Maxim (1840–1916) and numerous investors as a manufacturer of incandescent lightbulbs. The company later became a subsidiary of Westinghouse, based in Newark, New Jersey.
History
Formation
Sir Hiram S Maxim, an American-born British inventor famous for the Maxim gun, was looking to commercialize his patents for his electric lights. Maxim had tinkered with electric lighting since 1876 and he attracted multiple New York financiers to support his new company. In June 1878 the United States Electric Lighting Company was formed to market Maxim's inventions. The directors of the company pushed Maxim to enter the arc light industry, though Maxim continued to work on his incandescent bulbs.
In 1880 the directors brought in a new manager, Charles Flint, known as the "Father of Trusts", who realized that the company had no complete lighting system to offer its customers. Flint also noted the shaky patent positions and the looming ego of Maxim over the company. Flint's first step was to buy the Weston Company in order to secure Edward Weston's high-efficiency dynamo as the power source for a more marketable system. The merged companies would be called the Maxim-Weston Electric Company.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “United States Electric Lighting Company” as former American electric and lightbulb company. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q136842009. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1878, 1840, 1916 and 1876.
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This entry incorporates text from “United States Electric Lighting Company” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.