He married in 1885 at New Orleans, Mary H., daughter of William and Harriette G. Keatinge. He graduated from the U. S. Naval Academy at Annapolis with high honors. He then took special courses in electrical work. During the next five years while aboard the U. S. S. Richmond in the Chinese waters, the training ship Minnesota and the U. S. S. Lancaster of the Mediterranean, and as a member of the jury of scientists at the Crystal Palace Exhibition at Sydenham, England, he continued his experiments with incandescent electric lights, dynamo machines and gas engines. After one year as assistant to Thomas A. Edison, he organized the Sprague Electric Railway and Motor Co., and developed the stationary motor for industrial operations. In 1886 he first exhibited the fundamental method of mounting geared motors for electric railways which has come into universal use. In 1887 he equipped the Union Passenger Railways of St. Joseph, MO., and Richmond, VA., with motor cars having a complete overhead system, the latter of which was the first commercial electric road on a large scale, and which laid the foundation of the modern trolley development. In 1890 he organized the Sprague Electric Elevator Co., developing the high speed screw elevator, and with the latter he equipped the Central London Railway. In 1897 he equipped the South Side Elevated Road in Chicago with the multiple-unit system, which was the beginning of modern electric train operation, such as the underground, elevated and other roads of like character, and is used in addition to the motor car trains for the electric locomotive operation of the N. Y. Central, the New Haven and the Penn. Railroads. He was awarded a medal at the Paris Exposition in 1889, the Elliot Cresson Medal by the Franklin Institute in 1902, the grand prize by the St. Louis Purchase Exhibition in 1904 and the Edison Medal in 1911, for inventions and developments electric motors and electric railways and special achievements in the electric arts. He is Past-President and member of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers and the N. Y. Electrical Society; the American Society of Civil Engineers; the English Institutions of Civil and Electrical Engineers and the U. S. Naval Institute, and an associate member of the Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers. He was consulting engineer of the Sprague Electric, General Electric and Otis Elevator Commission, and later selected by the So. Pacific Company to prepare in collaboration with its officers, a report on the practicability of electrifying the Sierra Nevada mountain section of the Sacramento Division of that Company to increase its capacity, an operative problem generally admitted to be one of the most difficult in the railway world. He was a member of the University, Century Engineers, N. Y. Railroad, City Lunch and Sleepy Hollow Country Clubs. In politics he is an independent Republican. Ironically his father David Cummings Sprague was struck by a locomotive in Rahway, NJ, Sep. 25, 1896 and instantly killed. The preceding was taken from "The Ralph Sprague Genealogy" compiled and published by Edward G. Sprague, Barre, VT., 1913.

Frank and Harriett had three children, they are:

Robert Chapman
Julian King
Frances Althea