I include below a few paragraphs from my chapter on the Electrical industry from its early days.
An electrical development which would, unquestionably, greatly enhance the brightness of the cities was the invention in the 1860s of the dynamo. The discovery of electromagnetic induction by Michael Faraday, Robert Clark Maxwell and others in the 1830s enabled the generation of electricity by magneto-electric machines. The dynamo took Faraday’s thinking on electromagnetism and transformed it, so that a powered rotary motion could generate a steady flow of electricity. The power could be from a water wheel, where such was available, or a steam engine which was better suited to most urban areas. The dynamo would be connected to an arc-lamp and a bright light was the result. Sir Humphrey Davy features once more, since the invention of the arc-light is attributed to him. In a much developed form, the idea was brought to the eyes of the public outside the Gaiety Theatre in London in 1878 by Theatrical Entrepreneur, Jonathan Hollingshead. Thereafter it gained ground, with other small scale generators. The arc lamp remained a problem, since its carbon elements needed frequent replacement. The problem was eventually resolved by the development of the incandescent lamp.
Electric lighting was here to stay. Siemens Brothers provided the generators, wiring and lamps for the lighting of the Savoy Theatre. In 1881, they also installed a small generating station at Godalming in Surrey powered by water from the river Wey. Other names, long associated with electricity, entered the field: Crompton was making dynamos and electric motors in Chelmsford, Edison set up the Holborn Viaduct scheme in 1882, and, in 1886, Sebastian de Ferranti built the Grosvenor Gallery Station. Ferranti had worked for Siemens in their very new experimental department. By this time, William Siemens had died and his younger brother Alexander was running the firm.
Sebastian de Ferranti was born in Liverpool in 1864, the son of a photographer whose family had come from Bologna. Ferranti’s fascination, from a very early age, was with power generation and transmission. He was convinced that power generation did not need to be located near to the user, but rather close to the source of energy used. At school in Ramsgate, he had made both an electric light and a dynamo. When he left Siemens, he went into partnership with engineer friend, Alfred Thompson, and lawyer Francis Ince, and they manufactured dynamos to Ferranti’s design. The business was spotted by Sir William Thomson, later Lord Kelvin, who had made a similar machine, and they combined their ideas into the Ferranti-Thomson dynamo. The company didn’t achieve commercial success, and so closed. Ferranti pressed on, and, in the early 1880s, we come to the Grosvenor Gallery story. This piece of private initiative was a success and, on the back of it, Ferranti embarked on a project of Herculean proportions. The London Electric Supply Company was incorporated in 1887 with a capital of £1 million to build a power station at Deptford. Ferranti, at the age of twenty-three, was appointed chief engineer responsible for the whole project. He conceived a project of generators producing electricity which would be transmitted at 10,000 volts through cables and switchgear built to his own design. This was a massive project. Ferranti moved his works to Hollinwood in Lancashire, and, in 1897, employed seven hundred people.
Here I pause with a link for the Americans were in truth ahead of the game
There were of course many other companies exploring the application of electric power. One was a collection of British companies brought together by financier Emile Garcke under the banner British Electric Traction. Garcke was a champion of tramways and promoted their operation by public companies. He became manager and secretary of Brush Electrical Engineering Limited which had been formed to exploit the patents for arc lighting developed in the USA by Charles Francis Brush. The British Brush company operated first in London but grew out of its premises and looked for a suitable place for expansion. The site selected was in Loughborough next to the Midland Railway where the Falcon Engineering Works had been built by Henry Hughes who had begun by building carriages, railways carriage and eventually steam locomotives. The tie up with Brush was driven by the clear advantage that electricity had over steam as a means of traction in urban areas. Brush Electrical Engineering became a major manufacturer of electric powered locomotives whilst continuing with steam locomotive particularly for export markets; the last major contract for steam locomotives was for Siamese Railways in 1910.
The influence of overseas companies in the UK electrical and telephone industry was significant. I have already mentioned BTH and British Westinghouse, in 1903 the Swedish Ericson entered into a joint venture with the British National Telephone Company; previously it had sold half of its entire output in the UK.
The same was less the case with wireless, although Guglielmo Marconi was from Bolognia in Italy. His fascination was with radio waves, and he built on earlier work, by Hertz and others, for his first patent registered in England in 1897. Two years later he founded the Marconi Telegraph Company, again in England. In 1902 in the journal Science, W.S. Franklin wrote a letter suggesting very firmly that Marconi’s system would not replace submarine cables, and any attempt would lead to ‘a state of affairs closely analogous to the confused din of the stock exchange’. Franklin attaches the report in the London Electrician journal which recorded the sending of the Morse letter S from Cornwall to St John’s Newfoundland on 12 December 1901. Marconi did of course win the argument. Interestingly, the electricity powering the Morse signal was generated by a Hornsby engine.
You can read much more in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World.
British Manufacturing History 