Marnie Winston-Macauley has made yet another ‘jewish invention’ claim that we need to address in the form of the claim that jews invented the dimmer switch that can be found in many people’s homes to this day. The specific jew she names as its inventor is one Joel Spira. (1)
The truth behind this claim is both that Joel Spira was indeed jewish and he did invent an electronic dimmer switch in 1959 which he successfully patented as US3032688A. (2) However he certainly didn’t invent the electronic dimmer switch as Todd Bookman implies in his article for NPR on Spira when he wrote in 2015 that:
‘It was in 1959, tinkering in his Manhattan apartment, that Spira came up with a device that helped change the very way humans see each other: the dimmer switch. It was a new type of transistor that dramatically shrunk the hardware required to lower the lights.’ (3)
The second sentence clarifies the first so what Bookman is saying here is that Spira created a new kind of electronic dimmer switch that was a lot smaller than previous electronic dimmer switches and thus allowed this existing technology to be installed in people’s homes.
The website ‘KB Electric’ states this explicitly as follows:
‘Joel Spira wasn’t the first one to invent the concept of dimming lights; however, he was the first one to introduce the dimmer switch into homes for residential use. Dimming lights was only done in theater type settings back then because the systems were big and expensive, using a lot of heat to absorb energy needed to dim lights. Spira was able to produce a switch that dimmed the light by stopping energy flow using a thyristor transistor, which is how he was able to create a smaller control that fits into the walls of our homes.’ (4)
A good example of this pre-Spira history of dimmer switches is the work of mixed race American inventor Granville Woods who created and patented a ‘safety dimmer’ switch in 1896 as US569443A. (5) While English theatres were using ‘salt-water dimmers’ – an early form of dimmer switch – in the 1880s and 1890s to control their lighting during performances (6) that were based on the discovery of the liquid rheostat by English physicist Sir Charles Wheatstone in 1843. (7)
Thus, we can see that jews most certainly did not invent dimmer switches or even electronic dimmer switches. They merely took an existing innovation for several decades standing to a new market: residential homes.
References
(1) https://aish.com/91795029/
(2) https://patents.google.com/patent/US3032688
(3) https://www.npr.org/2015/10/24/451170011/a-light-bulb-moment-how-the-dimmer-switch-set-lusts-ablaze
(4) https://kbelectricpa.com/history-dimmer-switch/
(5) https://patents.google.com/patent/US569443
(6) https://cassstudio6.wordpress.com/lighting/change-over-to-electricity/; https://www.idc-online.com/technical_references/pdfs/electronic_engineering/Dimmer_Devices.pdf
(7) https://catalogue.museogalileo.it/object/WheatstoneRheostat.html
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