From Grosvenor to Deptford
From Grosvenor Gallery to Deptford : 1886-1891
In 1882 the British Government appointed Commissioners to visit the Paris Exhibition. The Earl of Crawford was one of those Commissioners and on his return he suggested to Sir Coutts Lindsay, proprietor of the fashionable Grosvenor Art Gallery in New Bond Street, London, that he should install electric light in the Gallery. Sir Coutts agreed, and early in 1883 installed a portable plant in the yard behind the Gallery to supply the Gallery with electric light. The supply was successful and applications were received from many other establishments in the neighbourhood with the result that very soon the small installation became seriously overloaded. Sir Coutts then joined with the Earl of Crawford and Lord Wantage in forming a small private company under the title 'Sir Coutts Lindsay and Co Ltd' which, owing to its origin, was familiarly known as the Grosvenor Gallery Company. A generating station of 1,000 kilowatts capacity was laid down and from this a supply was given by means of overhead cables at a pressure of 1,200 volts A.C.
From Grosvenor Gallery to Deptford : 1886-1891
In 1882 the British Government appointed Commissioners to visit the Paris Exhibition. The Earl of Crawford was one of those Commissioners and on his return he suggested to Sir Coutts Lindsay, proprietor of the fashionable Grosvenor Art Gallery in New Bond Street, London, that he should install electric light in the Gallery. Sir Coutts agreed, and early in 1883 installed a portable plant in the yard behind the Gallery to supply the Gallery with electric light. The supply was successful and applications were received from many other establishments in the neighbourhood with the result that very soon the small installation became seriously overloaded. Sir Coutts then joined with the Earl of Crawford and Lord Wantage in forming a small private company under the title 'Sir Coutts Lindsay and Co Ltd' which, owing to its origin, was familiarly known as the Grosvenor Gallery Company. A generating station of 1,000 kilowatts capacity was laid down and from this a supply was given by means of overhead cables at a pressure of 1,200 volts A.C.
The Gaulard and Gibbs system of distribution was adopted in which simple transformers called 'secondary generators' were connected in series and fed by Siemens generators with a current of 80 amperes flowing through the whole system. Difficulties arose, and throughout 1885 the Company received numerous complaints resulting from poor regulation, loss of supply, overloading and breakdowns until the situation was fast becoming desperate.
Ferranti, who had been a regular visitor at Grosvenor Gallery for the supply of meters, was consulted by the Company and he immediately condemned the series system advocating in its place the use of the parallel system with transformers of his own design which he demonstrated to the directors. To the list of patents he had already taken out from 1882 onwards for arc lamps, dynamos and meters he now added two important ones on transformers (15141 and 15251 of 1885). The former dealt with transformers with closed magnetic cores formed of iron strips or wires, and the latter with a fully worked-out parallel system of distributing electric energy using transformers in conjunction with high-tension and low-tension mains. On 13 January 1886 the directors appointed Ferranti Chief Engineer to the Company in full charge of the station. In the space of a few months of almost superhuman effort he had carried out his drastic reforms introducing the pattern of electricity supply which has become universal. The overhead network was remodelled for parallel working: transformers of his own design were installed in place of the Gaulard and Gibbs series devices, the voltage was doubled to 2,400 volts by connecting the windings of the Siemens alternators in series instead of in parallel (each alternator had two sets of 1,200 volt windings), and new switchgear was designed and erected. The following year the Siemens machines were replaced by two 750 horse-power alternators specially designed and built by Ferranti. Each of these was designed for ten thousand 10 candle power lamps but proved capable of heavier loads, one machine running for a long time with a load of nineteen thousand six hundred 10cp lamps without suffering injury. Soon there were five separate circuits radiating from a tower on top of the Gallery and controlled by main switches designed by Ferranti for breaking the high tension supply of 2,400 volts. The machines ran independently and by means of the switches the supply circuits could be connected
to either machine as required; the machines were never run in parallel.
to either machine as required; the machines were never run in parallel.
Customers who had been infuriated by the repeated breakdowns in the early supply had their confidence restored, and demands for new supplies increased rapidly. The directors decided to form a new company to take over the Grosvenor Gallery Station from Sir Coutts Lindsay and Co Ltd, and to extend operations in accordance with the far-reaching and ambitious plans of their young engineer. The new company, The London Electric Supply Corporation Ltd, was registered on 26 August 1887 with an authorised capital of £1,000,000. Headed by the Earl of Crawford and including Lord Wantage among its directors, it was privately subscribed to the extent of nearly half a million pounds and Ferranti was appointed Engineer and Electrician. The plan envisaged was the establishment of an unprecedentedly large generating station at Deptford about eight miles from London on the south bank of the river Thames—a complete departure from the previous practice of placing stations inside the load area. The site at Deptford was chosen because the land was cheap, river water plentiful and coal could be readily delivered. Here Ferranti planned to install generating plant with an ultimate capacity of 120,000 horse-power, sufficient to light the whole of London, and to carry the current to substations in London by means of cables operating at the unheard-of pressure of 10,000 volts, four times that used at Grosvenor Gallery. Nothing like it had ever been attempted before and the scheme was regarded by many as reckless and foolhardy. Work on the gigantic enterprise began immediately and Ferranti gave himself wholeheartedly to the task. His enthusiasm and energy so inspired all around him that he was able to confound his critics by bringing the main building and generating plant almost to completion before the end of the following year. In October 1888 the press were invited to witness the progress made and were enthusiastic in their praise. Engineering wrote: 'The new electrical machinery is so enormous as compared with anything in existence, that it may be deemed a perfectly novel creation, a monument to the confidence reposed by the directors in their engineer Mr. S. Z. de Ferranti.' The Electrical Engineer of 26 October 1888 summed up the general feeling: 'On Wednesday the designer of the great Deptford installation was laughingly dubbed the Michelangelo of that installation, because from first to last, from foundation to top of highest turret, architecture, materials, foundations, and machines, all were specified or designed by one man, and the credit of the success of the really first central station in England will have to be given, without detracting one iota in favour of any other person, to Ferranti. . . . It required not only courage on the part of the engineer, but also a degree of confidence in himself that few men possess in the earlier days of industrial development.' Word of the exciting events crossed the Atlantic and the Electrical World, New York, spoke with admiration of Ferranti's boldness in employing a potential of 10,000 volts in the 'herculean enterprise' which was calculated to exceed many times in capacity any other existing electric light installation in the world.
While the Deptford project was taking actual shape in bricks and mortar and generating plant, and in the laying of cables, the progress of electric lighting in Britain and especially in London was being beset by controversy, excessive competition between numerous small companies, and considerable bureaucratic intervention. The Electric Lighting Act of 1882 with its short
term of twenty-one years (after which period the company could be bought by the local authority at cost price) had rendered investment extremely hazardous and had stultified development; but at length this fact had been recognised and an amendment was passed in 1888 which extended the period of tenure to forty-two years. This had stimulated the formation of new companies and created difficulties in the allocation of areas of supply to such an extent that a special Board of Trade Inquiry, presided over by Major Marindin, was held in 1889 to decide on the methods and agencies to be used in the electric lighting of London. As a result, an Act only slightly less parochial in outlook than the one it replaced, was interpreted still more parochially: Provisional Orders were granted to many rival companies who undertook to establish stations in the parishes at the request of the vestries. The districts allotted to the London Electric Supply Corporation Ltd were grievously disappointing, being small and quite unimportant from the point of view of electric load. Almost the whole of the City, the area of greatest potential load, was allocated to the Metropolitan Electric Supply Co with six separate stations; and other companies were allowed to operate in various metropolitan districts. The result was that the Deptford scheme was allocated an area much less than that for which it had been designed; and even within this limited area had to face competition from small local stations, except in that part of the area south of the Thames, which at that time was scarcely a commercial proposition. Another serious aspect of this legislation was the encouragement it gave to the advocates of direct-current low-tension systems with stations dotted all over an urban area. It was with this situation that the Ferranti school had to contend whilst pioneering a new and untried comprehensive system of alternating current generated and transmitted from a single large station at a higher voltage than had ever been attempted before. The controversy between the advocates of the low-voltage direct current system and those of the high-voltage alternating current system persisted for many years. It became known as the 'Battle of the Systems', and led to fierce exchanges in the debating chambers of the Institution of Electrical Engineers and elsewhere.
The directors of the London Electric Supply Corporation Ltd proceeded with their great enterprise in spite of the adverse situation created by the Board of Trade's allocations until, on 26 October 1889, the Chairman the Earl of Crawford announced to representatives of the press : 'We have been at it night and day ever since. Now we have a very large engine-house erected, and have engines and dynamos at work of 3,000 horse-power. Two other dynamos and engines are in course of construction of 5,000 horse-power each. The boiler power we have put down is 14,000 horse-power. We found, when we inquired as to the construction of these dynamos, that there were no tools big enough to deal with them, except a few in arsenals and private works. We tried Krupp in Germany and the Creuzot works in France, and neither of them would contract to deliver under three years. As it did not suit our purpose to wait so long, we put up machinery ourselves, and we shall be able to complete these dynamos in a year. They are of unprecedented size. The lathe required to turn the main shaft is of the same dimensions as that used for turning the 100-ton gun at Woolwich. The shafts are 36 in. in diameter, and in the rough weighed 70 tons. They were the largest castings of steel ever made in Scotland. The dynamos are 42 ft. in diameter at the armature. As to their
lighting power, the dynamos working now at Deptford will supply 25,000 lights, and the two being constructed will rise to 100,000 each. We are also manufacturing the mains ourselves, and four machines are turning them out in 20 ft. lengths. By arrangement with the railway company the current is brought up from our generating station at Deptford along the South-Eastern line. We have running powers into Cannon-street Station, over Ludgate Railway Bridge, and over Charing-Cross Bridge. Two mains are laid alongside the line. The advantage of this is that we have got a private way, which we intend in due course to make use of. We have also running powers over the District Underground for these mains. Eventually we shall have eight or ten stations to distribute the light from, and at present we have practically six, including the Grosvenor, from which the machinery will be removed later on. These distributing stations need not be larger than a good-sized room.'
During the course of these developments a difficulty appeared from an unexpected quarter, which gave rise to legal proceedings of vital importance. Gaulard and Gibbs threatened an injunction against Sir Coutts Lindsay and Ferranti for infringement of their patent. Ferranti countered this by petitioning for the revocation of the Gaulard and Gibbs patent on the ground that it was in no way novel and that the claim fora general monopoly of the means of distribution was of great injury to the public. After litigation lasting for over two years with many famous counsel on both sides, Mr. Justice Kekewitch, in 1889, granted Ferranti's petition and revoked the patent. So impotant was the decision to the future of electricity supply, however, that Gaulard and Gibbs made an appeal. This was dismissed and was then followed by a final appeal to the House of Lords in 1890. The Lord Chancellor Lord Herschell, and Lord Morris found unanimously against the appellants thus clearing the way for development on the lines of Ferranti's ideas, namely the use of high-tension and low-tension mains with transformers connected in parallel.
A disastrous fire that occurred at the Grosvenor Gallery Station when it was being used as a temporary substation is but one of the host of misfortunes that befell the London Electric Supply Corporation and eventually led to a break between Ferranti and his directors. Nevertheless in his Engineer's Report of 3 March 1891 Ferranti stood by his policy with the statement: 'I desire to call attention to the fact that from the commencement of your operations to the present time, no engineering or electrical difficulties whatever have arisen which I have not been able to overcome, and at the present moment I know of no weak point in your system, and consider success to be now assured. . . . The fact that current of 10,000 volts pressure is transmitted every day to London is the most complete answer to such doubts. The great advantage of the high pressure system is apparent in that the loss involved in the transmission of current from Deptford to the distributing stations is inappreciable, while the facilities for procuring coal and water there, sufficiency of room for machinery and appliances, and freedom from the legal and financial consequences attending the erection of generating stations in crowded neighbourhoods, cannot fail to tell their own tale in the working expenses of the current year.'
This report turned out to be somewhat optimistic. Difficulties of supply and finances continued to press upon the Company, causing the directors to doubt Ferranti's policies. In May 1891 the Board decided to abandon the giant 10,000 volt 10,000 horse-power engines and alternators that Ferranti had planned and brought to an advanced stage of construction. The alternators, had they been completed, would have weighed nearly 500 tons each, with armature and shaft accounting for 225 tons. Differences arose, and in August 1891, when he was twenty-seven, Ferranti's connection with the Company came to an end.
The eminent consultants, John Hopkinson and J. Ambrose Fleming, in their Report of December 1891 on The Proposed Changes in the System of Supply of The London Electric Supply Corporation Ltd, expressed the opinion that 'the best of all remedies for the present failures and unsatisfactory supply would be a new generating station nearer its work, designed with smaller units of engines and dynamos and supplying direct at a moderate pressure without intermediate high-pressure transformers'
But in time, as engineering techniques advanced, Ferranti's principles of supplying electricity became universally adopted, bringing to reality his prophecy of December 1889:
`. . . in the future our railways will be worked, our lighting will be done, our power will be transmitted to a great distance; all this will be done entirely by the aid of High Pressure Electricity; it is high pressure in electricity like high pressure in steam, which is going to carry—which is carrying—everything before it, and this high pressure will be used, and will be doing the work of the world when the low pressure system ... has passed away and been forgotten.'