Charles Joseph Van Depoele

Van Depoele was born as Carolus Josephus Vandepoele in Lichtervelde, Province of West-Vlaanderen, Belgium, the son of Pieter-Joannes Vandepoele, a furniture maker from Ghent, and his wife, Marie-Theresia Algoet.[1] Three months after his birth, the family moved to Bruges. At a young age, he dabbled in electricity, and became so thoroughly infatuated with the subject that he entered upon a course of study and experiment in Poperinghe. In 1861, while at college, he produced his first light with a battery of forty Bunsen cells. Later, he moved to Lille, France, where he attended regularly the lectures and experiments of the Imperial Lyceum from 1864 to 1869.

In 1869 he moved to the United States and took up his residence in Detroit, where he made a living by manufacturing furniture. He did not abandon his electrical pursuits, experimenting with electric lighting, electric generators and electric motors, and eventually forming the Van Depoele Electric Manufacturing Company.

Electric locomotive car and train. Van Depoele, Minneapolis, 1883

As early as 1874, Van Depoele began investigations into the field of electric locomotion. Van Depoele's first electric railway was laid in Chicago early in 1883, and he exhibited another at an exposition in that city later in the same year. In 1885, he invented and demonstrated the first trolley pole,[2] a device used by electric streetcars (trams) to collect current from overhead wires, introducing it publicly on a line installed temporarily at the Toronto Industrial Exhibition in autumn 1885,[2] reportedly reaching 65 mph.[3] Fellow inventor Frank J. Sprague was studying similar ideas at the same time.[2] Sprague improved the design[4] and is sometimes credited as the trolley pole's inventor.

Near the end of 1887, thirteen North American cities had electric railways in operation; nine of these systems were designed by Van Depoele, and used overhead lines to transmit electric current from an electrical generator to the electric locomotives on the rails.

Van Depoele sold his electric motor business and related patents to the Thomson-Houston Electric Company in early 1888. He briefly thereafter devoted his efforts to his electric lighting business, until he sold that concern also to Thomson-Houston in mid-1889.