282 
NATURE 
[May 16, 1912 
It is worthy of note that the London Electric Supply | 
Corporation has now some time ago successfully | 
emerged from its period of financial distress, while 
Mr. Ferranti, though, as has been shown, he was 
one of the pioneers of electricity supply, still remains 
with us as one of the most vigorous intellects in the 
electrical industry, and one who, as president of the | 
Institution of Electrical Engineers, is even now 
dreaming fresh dreams of higher things and lower 
costs so far as electricity supply is concerned. 
During the period with which we have been deal- 
ing, so far as the public were then aware, the chief 
improvements that had been effected in connection 
with machinery for electricity supply had reference to 
the dynamos which generated the current, the 
batteries that stored it, the cables and switches and 
other apparatus that distributed it and regulated its 
performances. True, to some extent, special designs 
of steam engines had been got out to suit the require- 
ments of driving the fast-running dynamos, as, for 
instance, the well-known Willan’s engine. As yet, 
however, there had been no departure from the 
reciprocating engine. 
Early in the year 1885 the present speaker had the 
privilege, for the first time, of seeing running in the 
works of Messrs. Clark, Chapman and Parsons, 
Gateshead-on-Tyne, the first true rotary engine that 
ever gave useful results. The invention had been 
patented by Sir Charles Parsons in April, 1884, and 
in the interval this first practical steam turbine had 
been constructed. I am able to show you the actual 
machine, which the South Kensington Museum 
authorities have kindly sent here, withdrawing it for 
the evening from the congenial company of Watt’s 
beam engine and Stephenson’s ‘ Rocket,” amongst 
which it now has its appropriate abode. 
As will be seen, it is a very small machine directly 
coupled to a dynamo giving about six electrical horse- 
power when running at the great speed of 18,000 
revolutions per minute, and it is interesting to com- 
pare its parts, as, for instance, its blading, with that 
of the very large steam turbines on exactly the same 
principle that have been constructed in recent years, 
as, for instance, portions of blading such as is used 
in the turbines of the Mauretania, which, 
the courtesy of Messrs. C. A. Parsons 
also able to bring to your notice. 
The steam turbine has now come into very general 
use, being employed to the almost complete exclusion 
of other heat engines where very large electrical 
powers are wanted. At its inception, however, its 
inventor had many difficulties to encounter, together 
with much prejudice. Since the days of James Watt 
inventors up to that time had been continually trying 
to-produce a successful rotary engine, and all had 
failed. It was natural, therefore, for engineers to ask 
why this new inventor should succeed any more than 
those who had gone before. They did not realise that 
the advances that had been made in thermodynamics, 
and more especially in machine tools and workshop 
methods, ‘had rendered things practicable which, up 
till that time, had not been so; 
stand that here at last the subject was being tackled 
on really scientific principles by one exceptionally 
endowed by nature to grapple with it. Another diffi- 
culty that Sir Charles Parsons had to contend with 
and Co., I am 
was that, in the nature of things, experiments must | 
usually be conducted, in the first instance, on a small 
scale. Moreover, at that period, when the steam | 
turbine was only employed for driving dynamos, there . 
was no'demand for machines of any but what at the 
present day would be considered of very small size. 
Now it is one of the peculiarities of steam turbines | 
NO. 2220, VOL. 89] 
through | 
nor did they under- | 
that they are much easier to make in large sizes than 
in small sizes to give reasonable economy. Thus it 
was by reason of the very small powers that were 
wanted that in these earlier days turbines earned the 
opprobrious epithet of ‘* steam-eaters.”’ 
The Parsons steam turbine was first chiefly 
employed for the electric lighting of ships, but in 1887 
the whole of the electricity for lighting’ the Mining, 
Engineering, and Industrial Exhibition that was held 
in Newcastle-upon-Tyne was generated by a number 
of Parsons machines; while a little later the New- 
castle and District Electric Lighting Company was 
formed, the works of which on the banks of the Tyne 
were the first in which steam turbines were employed 
to afford a public supply of electricity for general 
lighting and other purposes. The first machines 
employed in this station were only of about 100 horse- 
power, while others of an improved type, which were 
first employed at Cambridge and at Scarborough, 
were of about double this power, and were considered 
as very large. The first steam turbines to be 
employed in London were used for the lighting of 
Lincoln’s Inn Hall, where they worked for many 
years, to be followed not long after, in 1891, by three 
others, each of 50 horse-power, at New Scotland Yard, 
which still exist, and to-day are providing electricity 
for lighting, printing, and other purposes, for the 
Metropolitan Police. 
Some fifteen years ago, in evidence that he gave 
before the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in 
connection with Sir Charles Parsons’s application for 
a prolongation of his patent, Lord Kelvin charac- 
terised the Parsons turbine as the most important 
development in steam engines since the days of James 
Watt. At the time this seemed a somewhat bold 
assertion, but in the light of experience it has proved 
to be a fact. 
I mentioned just now that it was on the banks of 
the Tyne that the steam turbine was first applied to 
the public supply of electricity, and it has also been 
on the banks of the Tyne, and in the adiacent areas 
of Northumberland and Durham, that the greatest 
existing development in this country of electricity 
supply for industrial purposes has taken place. Not 
the least of the causes that have led to this is the fact 
that, apart from London, where the circumstance are 
very special, in Newcastle-upon-Tyne alone among 
the great manufacturing cities of Great Britain has 
electricity supply remained in the hands of private 
enterprise, and not become municipalised. 
“The district covered by this vast power-supply 
undertaking extends as far north as Morpeth, as far 
west as Consett, is bounded on the east by the sea. 
and extends right away down through the county of 
Durham to Stockton-on-Tees, Middlesbrough, and 
Cleveland. There are seventeen generating stations, 
of which six are coal-fired stations, and the remainder 
most interesting waste-heat stations, where steam for 
making the electricity is obtained either from exhaust 
steam that has already done work in blowing or 
other engines, or by steam raised by blast-furnace 
gas or from the waste heat and gas from coke 
ovens. 
Excepting in the old original power station at 
Neptune Bank, where power supply was inaugurated 
by Lord Kelvin in June, 1901, and where there are 
still some reciprocating engines, the whole of the 
works are equipped with alternators driven by steam 
turbines, mostly of the Parsons type, supplying 
3-phase 4o-cycle current at voltages varying from 
3000 to 12,000. The power is supplied to all the lead- 
ing manufacturers for every kind of purpose, and also 
to the railway from Newcastle to the sea, which has 
