Heavy Current Electricity in the United Kingdom. History and Development

83 Pages·1979·3.308 MB·English

by  Christopher Hinton (Auth.)

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Heavy current electricity
in the United Kingdomx
history and development
BY
LORD HINTON OF BANKSIDE
O.M., K.B.E., F.R.S
P E R G A M ON P R E SS
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Copyright © 1979 Lord Hinton of Bankside
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First edition 1979
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Hinton, Christopher, Baron Hinton
Heavy current electricity in the United Kingdom:
history and development.
1. Electric utilities-Great Britain-History
I. Title
338.47*621310941 HD9685.G72 78-40696
ISBN 0-08-023246-9 (Hardcover)
ISBN 0-08-023247-7 (Flexicover)
Printed in Great Britain by Cox ά Wyman Ltd,
London, Fakenham and Reading
Preface
IT IS easy tobe 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 httle 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 manu-
facturmg 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 indus­
tries 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 nationahsed. 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 m 1947.
19th June 1978 LORD HINTON OF BANKSIDE
CHAPTER 1
Pre-history
The epoch-making discovery
At the end of August 1831 Michael Faraday wrote in his notebook: "Have
had an iron ring made (soft iron), iron round and | 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. WiU 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 Β
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.
2 HEAVY CURRENT ELECTRICITY IN THE UNITED KINGDOM
The years of engineering leadership
But it was epoch-making in another and equally important way. The
electric power industry was bom 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.^ 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:^
"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 super­
vening, 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; engin­
eering 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 Papin.
He did not take his idea beyond the point of testing it with a little
cylinder and piston in Huygen's laboratory where he was employed.
Papin's basic idea was put into practical form by Thomas Newcomen, an
^ R.S. Obituary: Qaude Dixon Gibb.
^ Deny and Williams, Short History of Technology.
PRE-HISTORY 3
ironmonger and smith who, possibly, did not know of Papin's experiment.
Newcomen's engines had a thermal efficiency of less than 1%, which can
be compared with the 38% that is achieved in large modern coal-fired
power plants, but his design was a masterpiece of engineering because it
kept within the limits of craftsmanship at that time. Newcomen's engines
were used without material change in design for 60 years and in 1769,
when Watt patented the separate condenser, there were fifty-seven
Newcomen engines working at mines in the Newcastle district alone.^
In Newcomen's engines the steam was condensed in the cyHnder so that
the cyHnder wall was cooled during each stroke of the piston. James Watt
reaUsed how great a loss of heat resulted from this and invented the
separate condenser. With characteristic thoroughness he considered alter­
native methods of applying his invention, including one for a novel and
complex rotary engine. It was only after careful thought that he decided
that it would be best to use his separate condenser as a development of the
well-tried Newcomen engine. Notice, once more, how the great engineer is
successful because he is not over-ambitious-"by that sin fell the angels".
Even so, Watt's engine could not have been a success without the develop­
ment of Wilkinson's boring mill, which was designed for machining gun
barrels-an early example of the fact that progress in one field of tech­
nology is dependent on developments in other fields and that the
production of armaments has often led to important advances in industrial
technology.
Watt also patented the expansive use of steam but this was of limited
value in his atmospheric engine and expansive working became really
valuable only when Trevithick, that erratic genius, pioneered the use of
"strong steam" (i.e. steam generated at pressures above atmospheric) and
built the first railway locomotive. Stephenson greatly advanced the tech­
nology and in 1829 his "Rocket" set the pattern of locomotive design for
the next century and was so successful that, for many years, his basic
designs were used on fixed platforms as well as for locomotion.
Yet all this was done by engineers who knew nothing about thermody­
namics and did not understand the nature of heat. Although Joseph Black
had investigated the change of state in water and, by his work on latent
heat, had provided the scientific basis for Watt's invention of the separate
^W. H. Dickinson,/Jm^i Watt.
4 HEAVY CURRENT ELECTRICITY IN THE UNITED KINGDOM
condenser, it does not seem that there was any determined or continuous
effort by scientists to explore the theory of thermodynamics. Heat was
conceived as "a subtle, invisible, weightless fluid, passing between the
particles of bodies with perfect freedom"."* It was in this way that Sadi
Carnot thought of it when he wrote his classical essay on "The Motive
Powerof Heat" which was published in 1824, a paper that was of outstand­
ing importance because it introduced the idea of a "cycle" which was
"reversible" if it was perfect.
It is interesting to ask oneself whether the conception of heat as a free-
flowing fluid may have helped rather than hindered Carnot in arriving at
those important conclusions. At the time when the steam engine was in­
vented, the conception of heat as a fluid fitted well with previous
experience. Power had previously been produced from water and from wind;
both of these were free-flowing fluids. It was not illogical to think that
heat, used to produce power, was another free-flowing fluid, which was no
more invisible than air. Smeaton had shown that the overshot water wheel
was more efficient than the undershot wheel and, in the overshot wheel,
the water was let down from a high level to a low level just as, in Carnot's
ideal engine, heat was let down from a high temperature to a low tempera­
ture. Obviously the overshot wheel was most efficient if all the water
entered the wheel at the highest possible level and left it at the lowest
possible level. By analogy, the heat engine would be most efficient if all
the heat was added at the highest achievable temperature and rejected at
the lowest available temperature; in both cases this gave a reversible cycle.
Carnot's own words in part of his essay suggest that this analogy had
directed his thoughts. The philosophy set out in Carnot's paper was the
logic of a practical engineer who accepted the widely held conception of
the nature of heat.
Earlier scientists had doubts about the "imponderable fluid" theory of
heat; in 1738 "Bernoulli had shown that, if a gas be imagined to consist
of molecules in motion, their impact on the walls of the containing vessel
would explain the relationships between pressure, temperature and
volume",^ and in 1798 Rumford had shown that the heat evolved when
boring a cannon was proportional to the work done. But there had been
httle continuous research on thermodynamics and it was not until the
W. C. Dampier, History of Science.
PRE-HISTORY
middle of the nineteenth century that Joule established the basic principles
and showed that heat and work are interchangeable.
The scientist becomes the pioneer
It can, of course, be urged that the history of electric power is similar
because electricity had been in practical use for half a century before its
nature was understood. But the difference Ues in the fact that the steam
engine was invented and developed by engineers; the scientists followed far
behind to study the theory and, for the first century of steam power, there
was Httle continuous effort by them to develop that theory. 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.
As Dampier says, "From toiling obscurely in the rear of empirical arts,
science passed on and held up the torch in front, the scientific age may be
said to have begun".^
The existence of tribo-electric phenomena had been known since time
immemorial and these phenomena had been seriously studied by scientists.
In the reign of Queen Elizabeth I Gilbert knew of some twenty different
materials on which static electric charges could be generated by rubbing.
The obvious next step was to mechanise the rubbing process and it is,
perhaps, surprising that this was not done until nearly 100 years later by
von Guericke. Interest was international and for many years before the
invention of the Leyden jar in 1745 the Germans led the field in the design
of electrical machines.'^ After that date, British scientists regained the lead
with the development by Cavallo of the glass-cylinder machines which
were still used a century later and could be found in school laboratories
within living memory. In 1768 the British instrument maker, John
Cuthbertson, moved to Amsterdam and published his Practical Electricity
and Galvanism in the Dutch language. With the initial encouragement of
Cuthbertson, van Marum developed his plate machine in which he used a
^W. C. Dampier, op. cit.
^W. D. Hackman,/?.5·. Notes and Records, Vol. 26, No. 2.
6 HEAVY CURRENT ELECTRICITY IN THE UNITED KINGDOM
mercury pad as a rubber and either glass or shellac plates. He brought his
design to a high state of perfection and the 31-in.-diameter glass plate
machine which he produced in 1791 was widely used for high voltage
work, though the British cylinder machines were preferred where lower
voltages were required.
By 1773 the largest EngUsh cyUnder machine was capable of producing
a discharge across 13 | in. in air, corresponding to a static voltage of
about 300,000 volts, while van Marum's machines gave discharges across
21 in., corresponding to a voltage of 500,000 volts. Even before such
high voltages were achieved it was natural that the similarity between
discharges from these tribo-electric machines and lightning flashes should
have attracted attention. Benjamin Franklin is usually credited with being
the first man to identify lightning as an electrical discharge, but it is
certain that work was going on concurrently with this in France (where
the use of pointed lightning conductor^ ^as first suggested) and in Russia
where Rickmann was killed by a lightning strike on a defective lightning
conductor. It is possible that the most remarkable feature of Franklin's
experiment was the care that he took over his safety precautions; the kite
with its sharp pointed wire which he used to draw down electricity from
the thunder cloud was attached to twine and "to the end of the twine next
the hand, is to be tied a silk ribbon and where the silk and the twine join
a key may be fastened—the person who holds the string must stand within
a door or window or under some cover so that the silk ribbon may not be
wet". Such care over safety precautions was extremely unusual among
pioneering scientists until very recently.
The fact that there are two kinds of electricity (now called positive and
negative), the difference between conductors -and insulators (the names
were invented in 1740) and a means of measuring the voltage of static
electric charges by Canton's pith balls had all been estabUshed by about
1750 so that, by the end of that century, the techniques for the produc­
tion and study of static electricity up to surprisingly high voltages were
well estabUshed.
Meanwhile, continuous-current electricity had been discovered. In
about 1786 the Itahan Galvani noticed that the leg of a frog contracted
under the influence of a discharge from an electric machine. Following this
up, he found that the same contraction occurred when a nerve and a
muscle were connected with two dissimilar metals placed in contact with