Heavy Current Electricity in the United Kingdom: History and Development

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Preface

IT IS easy to be forgotten. I retired from the Central Electricity Generating Board a few months before my sixty-third birthday largely because I wanted to do work in the Third World countries. I became a Special Adviser to the World Bank and spent much of my time overseas. When I gave up this work in 1970 I had little to do and to fill my spare time I wrote this monograph thinking that it might be used for a series of lectures.

Except for those parts which deal with the development of the manufacturing industry (where I had to rely on Marriott and Jones because I had no access to industrial archives) the monograph is based on original research carried out mainly in the House of Lords Library.

The story of the development of the electricity-supply industry in the United Kingdom is sad and goes hand-in-hand with one of my lectures which analyses Britain’s poor performance in the four great growth industries of the second half of the nineteenth century. This monograph tells how, after fathering electromagnetic induction, Britain lagged behind the Continent in the early years of industrial development and behind all other industrial countries in the later stages of development up to 1947 when the industry was nationalised. It shows that, by 1926, Britain was the most backward of all industrial countries in the structure of its electrical power industry and in its use of electricity. It shows the crippling effect of the Second World War and the brave efforts to catch up with the rest of the world after government shackles has been loosed. The story finishes at the point where the industry was reorganised in 1947.

19th June 1978

LORD HINTON OF BANKSIDE

CHAPTER 1

Pre-history

Publisher Summary

This chapter provides an overview of the discovery of electromagnetic induction. The discovery of electromagnetic induction was an epoch-making discovery because, together with the earlier invention of the steam engine, it made more difference to the pattern of world life than any other discovery since the invention of gunpowder. The history of electric power is similar to that of steam engine because electricity had been in practical use for half a century before its nature was understood. However, the difference lies in the fact that the steam engine was invented and developed by engineers. Electricity, on the other hand, had been systematically studied by scientists for more than half a century before engineers had reason to be interested in its practical uses and electricity gives us the first example of the modern pattern of development, in which new technologies are conceived in laboratories and nursed by scientists before being put to work by engineers.

The epoch-making discovery

in. thick and ring 6 in. in external diameter. Wound many coils of copper wire round one half, the coils being separated by twine and calico-there were three lengths of wire each around 24 ft. long and they could be connected as one length or used as separate lengths. By trial with a trough each was insulated from the other. Will call this side of the ring A. On the other side but separated by an interval was wound wire in two pieces, together amounting to about 60 ft. in length, the direction being as with the former coils; this side call B. Charged a battery of ten pairs of plates 4 in. square. Made the coil on B side one coil and connected its extremities by a copper wire passing to a distance and just over a magnetic needle (3 ft. from the iron ring). Then connected the ends of one of the pieces on A side with battery-immediately a sensible effect on needle. It oscillated and settled at last in original position. On breaking connection of A side with battery again a disturbance of needle. Made all the wires on A side one coil and sent current from battery through the whole. Effect on needle much stronger than before."

Faraday was recording his discovery of electromagnetic induction. The ring is still in the Royal Institution.

Many great scientists had come near to forestalling him and one had failed to do so through pure bad luck. But it was Faraday who made the discovery and the development of electric power dates from the paper which he read to the Royal Society on 24 November 1831 describing his experiment. It was an epoch-making discovery because, together with the earlier invention of the steam engine, it made more difference to the pattern of world life than any other discovery since the invention of gunpowder.

The years of engineering leadership

But it was epoch-making in another and equally important way. The electric power industry was born of and nursed by scientists; almost every previous industrial development had been brought into the world by practical men and had grown up in the hard nursery of industrial trial and error; the scientist had only been brought in post hoc, sometimes to explain a failure, sometimes because curiosity led him to seek explanations of phenomena which were already being put to practical use.

This was certainly true of the steam engine. When, in the seventeenth century, men’s thoughts first turned to the possibility of converting heat into power they had considered using gunpowder as the heat source and this was not surprising. It is interesting to remember that when, in the Second World War, that great power-plant engineer Sir Claude Gibb, who was in charge of armament production in the Ministry of Supply, was teasingly told by the artillery experts that he knew nothing about guns, his answer was that so far as he was concerned, a gun was the simplest form of internal combustion engine that he had ever been concerned with.¹ But gunpowder could not provide a practical source of industrial power and it was Papin who, in 1690, guided power-plant development into the right course. One often finds that those ideas which are of greatest importance are expressed in the clearest and most simple way; what Papin said was:²

Since it is a property of water that a small quantity of it turned into vapour by heat has an elastic force like that of air, but upon cold supervening, is again resolved into water, so that no trace of the said elastic force remains, I concluded that machines could be constructed wherein water, by the help of no very intense heat, and at little cost, could produce that perfect vacuum which could by no means be obtained by gunpowder. In those words he laid the foundation of steam-engine technology; engineering materials and manufacturing techniques made it impossible to use strong steam with safety; the early engines had to be atmospheric and they had to use the principle so clearly laid down by