Hawkins Electrical Guide Number One

Hawkins Electrical Guide Number One is the first volume of Nehemiah Hawkins’s ten-volume practical handbook on electrical engineering, first published in 1914. The series was one of the most widely used American electrical reference works of the early twentieth century and went through many printings across the following decades.

Volume One covers the basic principles of electricity, including current, voltage, resistance, electromagnetism, and the fundamental circuits and components that every electrician working with the new electrified American infrastructure needed to understand. The book is written for working tradesmen rather than for engineering students, with practical examples drawn from the actual industrial and domestic electrical work of the period.

Hawkins (1845-1928) was an American electrical engineer and educator. The Electrical Guide series became one of the standard references for the rapidly growing American electrical trade across the 1910s and 1920s, and original copies are now valued by collectors of early electrical engineering literature.