Willis Rodney Whitney (1868-1958), US inventor. Whitney trained as a chemist at Massachussetts Institute of Technology. Like many US students at the time, he completed his education in Germany, obtaining his PhD in 1898. He worked part-time at General Electric from 1900, eventually working there full-time after completing research in electrochemistry at MIT in 1908. By 1915 he was responsible for 250 staff, and oversaw work on inventions such as vacuum and gas-filled light bulbs, wireless telegraphy (radio) and X-ray technology. He retired in 1932. This photograph is from the Bain News Service, one of the USA's earliest news picture libraries. The photographs date from the 1890s to the 1930s.