A. Uno Lamm

Biography

Born in 1904, A. Uno Lamm was the son of Professor Fredrik Lamm of the Chalmers Institute of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden. He graduated from the Royal institute of Technology in Stockholm in 1927. In 1943 he earned his doctorate with a dissertation on the transductor as applied to rectifier control. In 1928 he joined the Swedish manufacturing firm of ASEA (Allmanna Svenska Electktriska Aktiebolaget). He was appointed head of the company's rectifier division in 1930 and in 1940 he became chief engineer of high tension switchgear and rectifiers. In 1955, Dr. Lamm was named to several new positions in ASEA, as well as becoming company director. He has written over 25 technical papers and has to his credit 133 Swedish patents and over 500 foreign patents. Much of his work has been on rectifiers, dry-cell and semi-conductor, but his most noteworthy achievement is the high-power. high-voltage mercury arc rectifier and its controls. The latter was first used in 1954 to rectify AC and invert DC power on a 100 kv line from Sweden to the island of Gotland. It was also applied to a similar power exchange across the English Channel between France and England, one connecting the New Zealand main islands, another between Sardinia and Italy, and one connecting Denmark and Sweden. For his invention, Dr. Lamm has earned the sobriquet, “Father of High Voltage Direct Current.” Dr. Lamm's achievements won him a number of professional awards: The Gold Medal of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Science in 1939; The Polhem Prize in 1940; the Arnberg Award of the Royal Swedish Academy of Science in 1947; the Gold Medal of the Swedish Society of Inventors in 1961; the John Ericsson Cold Medal of 1962 from the American Society of Swedish Engineers; and the Lamme Medal of the IEEE in 1965. He was a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences, the Institution of Electrical Engineers ( England) , the French Electrotechnical Society, and CICRE, and a fellow of IEEE.

In 1955 Lamm was made head of the ASEA project to develop Sweden's first commercial nuclear reactors. And in 1961 he moved to California to work with the General Electric Company on the Pacific DC Intertie Project, which combined long AC and HVDC transmission systems to move electrical energy from the hydroelectric generators of the Pacific Northwest to southern California.

A Uno Lamm died on June 1, 1989.