Farmer, Moses

Farmer, Moses (Gerrish) (1820–93) inventor; born in Boscawen, N.H. He left Dartmouth College because of poor health and he taught school in Maine and New Hampshire. Curious and clever, a compulsive tinkerer, he built a model electric train, designed a fire alarm system adopted by the city of Boston (1851), and devised a multiplex telegraph system (1855). In 1868, a decade before Edison introduced his electric light bulb, Farmer outfitted a house in Cambridge, Mass., with a dynamo and 40 incandescent lamps of his own invention.