William Cermak (1856-1907)
William Cermak, a master potter and son of master potter Josef Cermak, was born in 1856 in Kasejovice, Blatna, of what is now the Czech Republic, and came to the United States in 1886 at age 30. Several other Cermaks seemed to have come at about the same time, people who were probably cousins or brothers of William. One settled in the midwest and his branch of the family produced Mayor Anton J. Cermak of Chicago, who died in 1933 of an assassin's bullet intended for President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
William lived on the East Side in New York City in a cold water flat,
one
bathroom to each floor. He found work at a foundry or pottery in
the lower east side, and sent for his wife and three sons, Frank, Edward,
and Charles. They lived somewhere in or near downtown Schenectady. There
exists a picture of the Cermak boys on the porch of a school described
as being "on lower Union Street." William soon came to the attention of
a "head hunter" searching for good artisans and invited him to move to
Schenectady to become the head of the porcelain division of the new
Edison Electric Co., which merged with the Edison Machine Works to form
General Electric in 1892.
Up through the early 1890s, electrical insulators were made of glass, which was fragile and not capable of withstanding high voltages. In 1893, William Cermak, working with his subordinate John J. Kraus, developed the "petticoated" porcelain insulator usable with 10,000 volt transmission lines, a breakthrough that enabled the rapid growth of electrification in the United States.
In 1904, after the Cermaks moved to Fourth Ave in Schenectady's Mont Pleasant area, a neighborhood where many other Czechs lived, William was appinted Alderman for the Ninth Ward. At the time, Frank was 24 and working at General Electric, learning from his father and helping him. He later became an Alderman himself, and his son, also named Frank, was a Councilman in the Schenectady County Town of Niskayuna at the time of his death in 1971. In 1905, William became ill, so he and his wife and son Edward went back to Kasejovice for his health, leaving Frank to care for the ceramics building. Kasejovice is near the famous baths at Marienbad. But the intended respite did not help.
William returned to Schenectady, continued to decline, and died two
years later. He is buried in
Vale Cemetery.
The image below is that of a GE advertisement
in a 1920s National Geographic magazine. The exceptionally large ceramic
insulator shown with Frank Cermak, William's son, was moved from one place
to another several times
over the next sixty years and is currently
on display at the Schenectady
Museum.
This biography was compiled with the gracious assistance of Dr. Ethel Cermak Tomkins, William's granddaughter, who provided the photograph and the clippings from which the information was taken.
MEN OF GENERAL ELECTRIC
Biographical Sketches of Some Outstanding General Electric Men
