Luigi Emanueli
Luigi Emanueli (c1883-1959) of the Pirelli Rubber Co
1959 Obituary [1]
SIGNOR LUIGl EMANUELI, a vice-president of the Pirelli Rubber Company, who pioneered the oil-filled high-voltage cable, died at his birthplace, Milan, on February 17, at the age of seventy-six.
After graduating in electrical engineering at Milan Polytechnic, when he was twenty-three, Emanueli started work with the Pirelli Company. Two years later he presented a paper at the Associazione Elettrotechnica ltaliana summarising his work on losses in dielectrics subjected to alternating potentials. He applied the results of these studies to power cables and the measurements he made led him to discover the phenomenon of ionisation. In his work on insulating materials and, in particular, paper, he established the relationship between its porosity and its dielectric strength. He showed that this porosity could be turned to good account by impregnating paper insulation with certain compounds, thus reducing ionisation and increasing the dielectric strength, so that cables could be made to operate at much higher voltages than formerly. Oil-impregnated paper proved to be a particularly effective insulant and the first oil-filled cable was put into commission shortly after his appointment as chief engineer of the Pirelli Company in Milan in 1917 at the age of thirty-four.
Two years later he also became chief engineer of the associate Pirelli Company in Great Britain. Although most of Emanueli's discoveries were of special application to power cables he also did much pioneer work on telephone and telegraph cables. For instance in 1910 he was responsible for the design and Installation of a twin conductor continuouslyloaded telephone cable linking Milan with a hydro-electric station 150 miles distant. Emanueli was president of the Associazione Elettrotechnica ltaliana from 1933 to 1935.
In November last he became an honorary member of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers. Less than a month ago the council of the Institution of Electrical Engineers, London, announced that the thirty-seventh award of the Faraday Medal would be made to Emanueli for his outstanding contribution of inventions and new applications in electrical cables and particularly for his invention of the oil-filled cable.