B 30 - The Brown Boveri Review- BBC House Journal and Transformers- Part 1

Brown Boveri Company (BBC) was established on October 2, 1891, by Charles Brown and Walter Boveri in Baden (Switzerland) to manufacture electrical power products, including transformers. They were ex-employees of Maschinen Fabrik, an electrical manufacturing company in Oerlikon (MFO), Zurich. Although both men came from an engineering background, Boveri grew increasingly active in the commercial business and growth of the company, whereas Brown continued to focus on core engineering challenges. The two Bs in ABB company name still keep their name remembered.

?BBC published a house journal to inform sales agents and business partners of the company's products, developments, and activities. The first issue, The Brown Boveri Review 1, came out in July 1914, 110 years ago. Remember, the first issues of Reader's Digest and TIME Magazines were in 1918 and 1923! Although BBC's full name was "Brown, Boveri & Company," the journal was spelt without the comma – The Brown Boveri Review. In later years, distribution grew to encompass a broader readership, including customers and suppliers, consultants and journalists, universities, educators, students, and laypeople interested in technology.

I first encountered this impressive technical journal in early 1970 and enjoyed its transformer articles. I learned many aspects of transformer engineering from those articles. Brown Boveri Review was open to sharing core technical findings and knowledge compared to similar journals from other electrical manufacturers. One BBC engineer, a transformer designer at BBC Mannheim, once told me about the BBC veterans of the 1950s and 60s. They were not engineers, natural scientists who would rejoice if a transformer failed at the testbed, spending months on the shop floor, disassembling parts and going deep into finding out the root cause and inventing some unique solutions to prevent such faults in future, meanwhile pocketing one or two patents for the company!

Bi-monthly Brown Boveri Review issues carried rich articles on transformer selection, engineering, testing, or O&M. Those days were without photocopiers, so I copied some interesting BBC articles by hand in black ink, using a fountain pen. My old files still carry those notes, yellowed, dog-eared papers. In addition, there were particular issues on transformers, carrying articles exclusively on transformers. Between 1942 and 1978, there were six special issues on transformers- collector's items for transformer engineers.

Charles Eugene Lancelot Brown and Walter Boveri jointly founded BBC in 1891. Both men passed away in 1924. Theirs were the only obituaries ever to have been published on the pages of The Brown Boveri Review. BBC and ASEA merged in 1988 to form ABB.ABB combined? Brown Boveri Review and ASEA Journal to issue ABB Review, which is still published in Zurich. When I was working with ABB, Hitachi Energy acquired the Power Products division of ABB in 2020, and the transformer division became part of Hitachi. I started my career in a subsidiary of Hitachi in 1966. The circle was completed, and I left ABB in 2020. Before leaving ABB, my unfulfilled dream was the company to publish a historical volume on ABB transformers, compiling all transformer articles published in BBC Review and ASEA Journal. In the next part of this article, I shall include an index of transformer articles published in the BBC Review during 74 years of its existence, 1914-1988.

When celebrating the centenary of Brown Boveri Review, ABB (earlier BBC) had another item to celebrate—a BBC transformer in service for a century!

(Reference: Andrea Moglestue, 100 years of ABB Review, ABB Review, 2/14, Pages 6-20, 2014)