Nehemiah Hawkins

Hawkins set out to explain electricity to the men who worked with it rather than to engineers who had studied it. His Electrical Guide ran to ten small flexible volumes from 1914, laid out as questions and answers and thick with line drawings, covering dynamos, motors, wiring, storage batteries, telegraphy and telephony. Theodore Audel and Company published them, and Audel was Hawkins himself: the firm was his own imprint under another name. The drawings outlived the text and were still being reused in Audels trade manuals decades afterwards. Hawkins lived from 1833 to 1928, and the guides passed into the public domain long ago.