Introduction as written by Arthur Ridding in his Science Museum Booklet in 1964
Fifty years after Faraday's discoveries of the fundamental principles of electromagnetic induction, progress in electric lighting was slower in England than in Europe and America. Arc lighting had been installed in lighthouses but public lighting by electricity had only come into being in 1878 with the lighting, in London, of the Victoria Embankment, the Holborn Viaduct and the Mansion House, by the successful 'Jablochkoff Candle' arc lamps operaing in series on alternating current. Edison in America and Swan in England had produced their incandescent filament lamps; but these were of such recent origin that there was no direct reference to them in the evidence given by any of the prominent engineers appearing before the Select Committee of the House of Commons in 1879, when an enquiry was being held to decide on legislation for electric lighting.
But public interest in electrical matters grew rapidly, giving rise to correspondence in The Times and cartoons in Punch. By the end of 1881 Edison had constructed his power station at Pearl Street, New York, to serve consumers using his carbon filament lamps; the Savoy Theatre, London, had been lit by Swan incandescent lamps; and new companies were being formed every few days to exploit the new developments. In the summer of that year, seventeen-year-old Sebastian Ziani de Ferranti was appointed by Alexander Siemens to the Experimental Department of the Siemens works at Charlton. Here, as young Ferranti put it, he had 'a most fortunate place ... which is as good for me as if I was spending piles of money weekly on experiments'.
While on one of his many excursions up and down the country superintending the installation of electric lighting plants, Ferranti became acquainted with Alfred Thompson, an engineer; and, having completed his inventions of a generator and arc lamp which he had started at school, Ferranti entered into a partnership agreement with Thompson to take out patents in the name of S. Z. de Ferranti, form a company and share the profits. As Ferranti was a minor of eighteen his father was legally required to give consent to this agreement. Patents Nos 3418 and 3419 covering these inventions were taken out in July 1882, the first of well over two hundred patents Ferranti was to take out in his lifetime. Meanwhile Alfred Thompson had introduced him to a wealthy London lawyer, Francis Ince, who was interested in electrical science as a diversion from practising law, and it was found that Sir William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) had made a similar dynamo invention about the same time. It was agreed to combine the inventions, and a company named Ferranti, Thompson and Ince Limited was formed in September of the same year to manufacture the machine as a joint invention, a suitable royalty being paid to Sir William. Sebastian Ferranti was appointed Engineer of the company and held one share. The machine was called the Ferranti-Thomson Dynamo Machine, and The Hammond Electric Light and Power Supply Company Limited exercised the sole selling rights.
This machine with its novel `zig-zag' armature and vastly greater efficiency than any existing dynamo created a sensation when it was announced, so much so that one of the technical journals stated that the figures given 'must be taken with a grain of salt'. The machine gave five times as much output as any other machine of equal size (the output then being measured in terms of the number of incandescent lamps that could be lit satisfactorily) and was so far ahead of its rivals that it brought Ferranti into a position of considerable repute. When, after some twelve months, both companies went into voluntary liquidation, Ferranti bought back his own patents and, at the end of 1883, commenced manufacturing on his own account in a small workshop on the top floor 57b Hatton Garden in the City of London. Here he busied himself with the manufacture of alternators, arc lamps, meters and other devices of his own invention.
Meanwhile, other events were taking place which were to decide Ferranti's future. The Grosvenor Gallery Company had embarked upon a system of supply that was giving endless trouble and Ferranti was brought in to advise. He did this most effectively and so impressed the directors that on 13 January 1886 they appointed him Chief Engineer of the station at the age of twenty-one. The venture thus begun led to the formation of the London Electric Supply Corporation Ltd and resulted in the first example of the large-scale generation of electrical energy.
Ferranti's connection with the London Electric Supply Corporation Ltd as their Engineer ended in 1891 and from the immediate problems of generating and transmitting at high voltage he turned his attention to his manufacturing business then at Charterhouse Square. His fame as an authority on electric lighting had spread far afield and he equipped many stations in England and abroad with alternators, transformers, switchgear, fuses, meters and many other devices. In the field of arc lighting he made rectifiers which gave a notable improvement in the application of arc lamps for street lighting. His cable inventions, which included the first use of paper insulation for high voltage work, were taken up by the British Insulated Wire Co, and he became a director and shareholder of that company. He invented a new form of steam valve and other devices for steam engines and developed a slow speed engine with integral flywheel alternator which was adopted by many supply companies. His interests and inventions ranged over a wide and varied field: incandescent lamps, spectacles, telephony transformers, distribution transformers, induction furnaces, synchronous motors, electric railways, flexible cables ('Litz' wire), rotary rectifiers, the manufacture of white lead, the storage of mechanical energy, turbines, smoothing condensers, surge absorbers, bicycle drives and tyres. All these and more were covered by Ferranti patents.
Unfortunately, financial results did not match the engineering successes and Ferranti was forced into making many journeys to get loans and orders in a desperate struggle to keep things going. Turning his company into a limited liability company brought an improvement and in 1896-7 the business was transferred to a larger factory at Hollinwood in Lancashire where work was expanded, including the manufacture of combined steam engines and alternators. This move brought Ferranti into an entirely new sphere of interest which occupied him for many years. Hollinwood was in the heart of the cotton spinning industry which played so large a part in the country's economy. He saw that if the output of the industry could be increased by faster spinning speeds the whole country would benefit. Setting himself to the task, he brought a completely fresh approach to the problem and devised small air turbines to drive each individual spindle. The spinning speed was raised from a few thousand revolutions per minute to 20,000 r.p.m. and much progress was made. However, the many intricate problems were never completely solved although he continued experimenting on and off until his death in 1930.
Prime movers had always fascinated Ferranti and while he had used slow-speed reciprocating steam engines for his generators he had seen the advantages of the turbine and as early as 1895 took out a patent (No 2565) for Improvements in Steam, Hot-air and Other Engines. Many other turbine inventions followed and he was responsible for experimental work at Vickers, Sheffield, which produced a 3,000 kW re-superheating turbine which gave results in advance of all other turbines at that time.
During the first world war the Hollinwood factory was engaged in munitions. Ferranti, with two sons in the war, applied all his ingenuity and skill to improving plant and manufacturing methods. The result was the highest output per worker of any shell factory in the United Kingdom. After the war, he renewed his experiments with a gas turbine equipped with regenerators, and a small experimental turbine was run at red heat for long periods with a high degree of efficiency. When public broadcasting started in the early 1920s he made significant advances in the design of audio frequency transformers and followed this by radiant fires of improved type. He campaigned strongly for the increased use of electricity for domestic and industrial purposes but did not live to see the prodigious growth that he had striven for and predicted
Ferranti was honoured by the Institution of Electrical Engineers, which elected him President for two successive years 1910 and 1911 and awarded him the Faraday Medal in 1924; by the University of Manchester, which conferred the honorary degree of Doctor of Science in 1912; and by the Royal Society, who elected him a Fellow in 1927. After his death in Zurich on 13th January 1930 The Engineer said of him:
`Ferranti was essentially a pioneer; just as much a pioneer as those who sailed across uncharted seas in search of new lands in centuries gone by... . Such men as he come into the world but rarely. Their composition requires the happy combination of many qualities: energy, courage, vision, the ability to seize upon essentials, the inventive instinct and the power of influencing the minds of other men.'
Fifty years after Faraday's discoveries of the fundamental principles of electromagnetic induction, progress in electric lighting was slower in England than in Europe and America. Arc lighting had been installed in lighthouses but public lighting by electricity had only come into being in 1878 with the lighting, in London, of the Victoria Embankment, the Holborn Viaduct and the Mansion House, by the successful 'Jablochkoff Candle' arc lamps operaing in series on alternating current. Edison in America and Swan in England had produced their incandescent filament lamps; but these were of such recent origin that there was no direct reference to them in the evidence given by any of the prominent engineers appearing before the Select Committee of the House of Commons in 1879, when an enquiry was being held to decide on legislation for electric lighting.
But public interest in electrical matters grew rapidly, giving rise to correspondence in The Times and cartoons in Punch. By the end of 1881 Edison had constructed his power station at Pearl Street, New York, to serve consumers using his carbon filament lamps; the Savoy Theatre, London, had been lit by Swan incandescent lamps; and new companies were being formed every few days to exploit the new developments. In the summer of that year, seventeen-year-old Sebastian Ziani de Ferranti was appointed by Alexander Siemens to the Experimental Department of the Siemens works at Charlton. Here, as young Ferranti put it, he had 'a most fortunate place ... which is as good for me as if I was spending piles of money weekly on experiments'.
While on one of his many excursions up and down the country superintending the installation of electric lighting plants, Ferranti became acquainted with Alfred Thompson, an engineer; and, having completed his inventions of a generator and arc lamp which he had started at school, Ferranti entered into a partnership agreement with Thompson to take out patents in the name of S. Z. de Ferranti, form a company and share the profits. As Ferranti was a minor of eighteen his father was legally required to give consent to this agreement. Patents Nos 3418 and 3419 covering these inventions were taken out in July 1882, the first of well over two hundred patents Ferranti was to take out in his lifetime. Meanwhile Alfred Thompson had introduced him to a wealthy London lawyer, Francis Ince, who was interested in electrical science as a diversion from practising law, and it was found that Sir William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) had made a similar dynamo invention about the same time. It was agreed to combine the inventions, and a company named Ferranti, Thompson and Ince Limited was formed in September of the same year to manufacture the machine as a joint invention, a suitable royalty being paid to Sir William. Sebastian Ferranti was appointed Engineer of the company and held one share. The machine was called the Ferranti-Thomson Dynamo Machine, and The Hammond Electric Light and Power Supply Company Limited exercised the sole selling rights.
This machine with its novel `zig-zag' armature and vastly greater efficiency than any existing dynamo created a sensation when it was announced, so much so that one of the technical journals stated that the figures given 'must be taken with a grain of salt'. The machine gave five times as much output as any other machine of equal size (the output then being measured in terms of the number of incandescent lamps that could be lit satisfactorily) and was so far ahead of its rivals that it brought Ferranti into a position of considerable repute. When, after some twelve months, both companies went into voluntary liquidation, Ferranti bought back his own patents and, at the end of 1883, commenced manufacturing on his own account in a small workshop on the top floor 57b Hatton Garden in the City of London. Here he busied himself with the manufacture of alternators, arc lamps, meters and other devices of his own invention.
Meanwhile, other events were taking place which were to decide Ferranti's future. The Grosvenor Gallery Company had embarked upon a system of supply that was giving endless trouble and Ferranti was brought in to advise. He did this most effectively and so impressed the directors that on 13 January 1886 they appointed him Chief Engineer of the station at the age of twenty-one. The venture thus begun led to the formation of the London Electric Supply Corporation Ltd and resulted in the first example of the large-scale generation of electrical energy.
Ferranti's connection with the London Electric Supply Corporation Ltd as their Engineer ended in 1891 and from the immediate problems of generating and transmitting at high voltage he turned his attention to his manufacturing business then at Charterhouse Square. His fame as an authority on electric lighting had spread far afield and he equipped many stations in England and abroad with alternators, transformers, switchgear, fuses, meters and many other devices. In the field of arc lighting he made rectifiers which gave a notable improvement in the application of arc lamps for street lighting. His cable inventions, which included the first use of paper insulation for high voltage work, were taken up by the British Insulated Wire Co, and he became a director and shareholder of that company. He invented a new form of steam valve and other devices for steam engines and developed a slow speed engine with integral flywheel alternator which was adopted by many supply companies. His interests and inventions ranged over a wide and varied field: incandescent lamps, spectacles, telephony transformers, distribution transformers, induction furnaces, synchronous motors, electric railways, flexible cables ('Litz' wire), rotary rectifiers, the manufacture of white lead, the storage of mechanical energy, turbines, smoothing condensers, surge absorbers, bicycle drives and tyres. All these and more were covered by Ferranti patents.
Unfortunately, financial results did not match the engineering successes and Ferranti was forced into making many journeys to get loans and orders in a desperate struggle to keep things going. Turning his company into a limited liability company brought an improvement and in 1896-7 the business was transferred to a larger factory at Hollinwood in Lancashire where work was expanded, including the manufacture of combined steam engines and alternators. This move brought Ferranti into an entirely new sphere of interest which occupied him for many years. Hollinwood was in the heart of the cotton spinning industry which played so large a part in the country's economy. He saw that if the output of the industry could be increased by faster spinning speeds the whole country would benefit. Setting himself to the task, he brought a completely fresh approach to the problem and devised small air turbines to drive each individual spindle. The spinning speed was raised from a few thousand revolutions per minute to 20,000 r.p.m. and much progress was made. However, the many intricate problems were never completely solved although he continued experimenting on and off until his death in 1930.
Prime movers had always fascinated Ferranti and while he had used slow-speed reciprocating steam engines for his generators he had seen the advantages of the turbine and as early as 1895 took out a patent (No 2565) for Improvements in Steam, Hot-air and Other Engines. Many other turbine inventions followed and he was responsible for experimental work at Vickers, Sheffield, which produced a 3,000 kW re-superheating turbine which gave results in advance of all other turbines at that time.
During the first world war the Hollinwood factory was engaged in munitions. Ferranti, with two sons in the war, applied all his ingenuity and skill to improving plant and manufacturing methods. The result was the highest output per worker of any shell factory in the United Kingdom. After the war, he renewed his experiments with a gas turbine equipped with regenerators, and a small experimental turbine was run at red heat for long periods with a high degree of efficiency. When public broadcasting started in the early 1920s he made significant advances in the design of audio frequency transformers and followed this by radiant fires of improved type. He campaigned strongly for the increased use of electricity for domestic and industrial purposes but did not live to see the prodigious growth that he had striven for and predicted
Ferranti was honoured by the Institution of Electrical Engineers, which elected him President for two successive years 1910 and 1911 and awarded him the Faraday Medal in 1924; by the University of Manchester, which conferred the honorary degree of Doctor of Science in 1912; and by the Royal Society, who elected him a Fellow in 1927. After his death in Zurich on 13th January 1930 The Engineer said of him:
`Ferranti was essentially a pioneer; just as much a pioneer as those who sailed across uncharted seas in search of new lands in centuries gone by... . Such men as he come into the world but rarely. Their composition requires the happy combination of many qualities: energy, courage, vision, the ability to seize upon essentials, the inventive instinct and the power of influencing the minds of other men.'