Charles Legeyt Fortescue

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Charles LeGeyt Fortescue (1876-1936) was born in York Factory, in what is now Manitoba where the Hayes River enters Hudson Bay. He was the son of a Hudson's Bay Company fur trading factor and was among the first graduates of the Queen's University electrical engineering program in 1898.

On graduation Fortescue joined the Westinghouse corporation where he spent his entire professional career. In 1901 he joined the Transformer Engineering Department and worked on many problems arising from the use of high voltage. In 1913 Fortescue published the AIEE paper "The Application of a Theorem of Electrostatics to Insulator Problems" . Also in that year he was one of the authors of a paper on measurement of high voltage by the breakdown of a gap between two conductive spheres, which is a technique still used in high-voltage laboratories today.

In a paper presented in 1918 (Method of Symmetrical Co-Ordinates Applied to the Solution of Polyphase Networks) Fortescue demonstrated that any set of unbalanced three-phase quantities could be expressed as the sum of three symmetrical sets of balanced phasors known as symmetrical components.

A fellowship awarded every year by the IEEE in his name commemorates his contributions to electrical engineering.