434 Mr. Alan A. Campbell Swinton [April 19, 



new electrical evangel, while Sir "William Crookes, as he recently ex- 

 pressed it, came back from Paris " red hot," and proceeded to light 

 his house at 7 Kensington Park Gardens, not only laying with his own 

 hands the necessary wires under the floor-boards, in glass tubes with 

 plaster-of -Paris joints — wires that are still in use to this day — but 

 even making his own lamps, with the result that by September 1881 

 the house was lighted up by means of current supplied by a small 

 Biirgen dynamo in the basement, driven by an Otto gas engine. 



By the courtesy of Sir William Crookes there are on view on the 

 lecture table specimens of the incandescent lamps that he made at that 

 time, together with other early lamps of Swan, Edison, and Maxim of 

 the same date. Sir William Crookes' house seems undoubtedly to have 

 been the first house in London permanently lighted by electricity. 

 Mr. Spottiswoode also had very early electric lighting at Combe Bank, 

 and Sir Joseph Swan at Bromley ; while Mr. Robert Hammond's 

 house, it is claimed, was the first to be electric lighted from cellar to 

 attic, to the complete exclusion of all other illuminants. This was 

 in 1882. 



It was also in 1882 that Parliament passed the first of the Electric 

 Lighting Acts which have done so much to hinder the progress of 

 electricity supply in this country. This Act was in part based upon 

 recommendations made by a Select Committee on Lighting by Elec- 

 tricity that sat in 1879, and as an instance of the want of proportion 

 in the ideas that then prevailed it may be mentioned that before that 

 Committee Mr. Joseph Rayner, the Town Clerk of Liverpool, explained 

 that one of the reasons why the Corporation of Liverpool were seeking 

 for Parliamentary powers to supply electricity within their borough 

 was because they were in a specially advantageous position to do this, as 

 they had an engine which was used during the daytime for working 

 a fountain and might well be used for supplying electricity duiing the 

 night, that engine having a capacity of 20 horse-power. At the end 

 of last year the electric supply plant of the Corporation of Liverpool 

 amounted to about 50,000 horse-power, which, when compared with 

 this 20 horse-power engine, affords a commentary on the parochial 

 character of the ideas in accordance with which the first of the Elec- 

 tric Lighting Acts was framed. 



Again, in the year 1882 the first electric supply station for supply- 

 ing incandescent lamps on a public scale in London was established 

 by the Edison Company on Holborn Viaduct. The Holborn station 

 was equipped with two Edison dynamo machines, one of which is 

 illustrated in Fig. 2, and it is interesting, as giving an inkling of the 

 notions then prevailing, that these machines were described by the 

 then editor of one of our chief engineering papers as " enormous," it 

 being added, evidently as a matter of wonder, that " no less than 

 1000 full size or 16-candle incandescent electric lamps were main- 

 tained constantly in operation from one machine." It may be men- 

 tioned that each of these dynamos was driven by a high-pressure 



