Charles Francis Brush (March 17, 1849 – June 15, 1929) was an American engineer, inventor, entrepreneur, and philanthropist.

[2] Delia was also a descendant of Henry Wisner, member of the First and Second Continental Congresses during the American Revolution, as well as Thomas Cornell (settler) and the Winthrop family.

Brush attended Central High School in Cleveland where he built his first arc light, and graduated there with honors in 1867.

[7][8] In 1876 he secured the backing of the Wetting Supply Company in Cleveland to design his "dynamo" (an electrical generator) for powering arc lights.

Brush remarked on his motivation for improving the generator in his U.S. patent 189,997: "The best forms of magneto-electric apparatus at present before the public are unnecessarily bulky, heavy, and expensive, and are more or less wasteful of mechanical power."

His generators were reliable and automatically increased voltage with greater load while keeping current constant.

[9] The San Francisco system was the first case of a utility selling electricity from a central plant to multiple customers via distribution lines.

[19] In 1888, he powered the mansion with the world's first automatically operated wind turbine generator which charged the home's 12 batteries.

[22] Between 1910 and 1929 he wrote several papers on his version of a kinetic theory of gravitation, based on some sort of electromagnetic waves.