 He was educated in London, then worked for the Westinghouse Electric Company in Pittsburgh from 1887 to 1890.He started there as a draughtsman before becoming a laboratory assistant, and later an erection engineer.For two years in the early 1890s he worked in New York City at the journal "Electrical World" as an assistant editor, at the same time studying chemistry at the New York City College of Technology, and by 1900 he had worked with both Nikola Tesla and Mihajlo Pupin in New York.