Fyodor Pirotsky

Fyodor Apollonovich Pirotsky (1845 to 1898) was a Russian army artillery officer and engineer of Ukrainian Cossack ancestry who experimented with carrying electric current through railway rails. Educated in Saint Petersburg and posted to Kiev, he befriended the electrical engineer Pavel Yablochkov, and from 1874 he tested power transmission over roughly a kilometre of the Sestroretsk railway line, using the two insulated rails as the outgoing and return conductors of a Gramme generator. In 1880 he converted a two-deck horse tramway in Saint Petersburg to electric power, and public service began on 3 September 1880. Some historians count it as the first electric tram in the world. Carl Heinrich von Siemens met him and questioned him closely, and Siemens began producing electric trams in 1881. Pirotsky received little reward, retired a colonel in 1888 and died in poverty in 1898.