SECTION G.—ENGINEERING. 
A HUNDRED YEARS OF ELECTRICAL 
ENGINEERING. 
ADDRESS BY 
PROFESSOR G. W. O. HOWE, D.8c., 
PRESIDENT OF THE SECTION. 
Tus Section of the British Association, over which | have the honour to 
preside, is concerned with the whole field of engineering, civil, mechanical 
and electrical. Within recent years the great developments which have 
taken place in each of these branches have necessarily led to a high degree 
of specialisation, with the result that a man may have an expert knowledge 
of one branch but a very slight knowledge of the other branches ; in fact, 
the scope of a single branch is now so extensive and the amount of re- 
search work being done so great that it is impossible to keep abreast of the 
developments in one’s own special subject unless one concentrates upon 
it to a degree that leaves little leisure for cultivating other branches of 
engineering. These considerations influenced my choice of a subject for this 
Presidential Address. As an electrical engineer, I felt that I should be 
expected to deal with some branch of electrical engineering—indeed, I 
should not feel competent to discuss any other branch—but, in view of the 
facts to which I have referred, I decided not to deal in detail with any 
single section of the subject, but to review the past development and 
present position of the subject as a whole. 
The time for such a review is opportune. William Thomson, after- 
wards Lord Kelvin, the only man who has ever been elected three times 
(in 1874, 1889, 1907) President of the Institution of Electrical Engineers, 
was born on June 26, 1824. He was closely associated with the British 
Association and for sixty years took an important part in the meetings. 
He was President of the Association at the Edinburgh Meeting in 1871, and 
was several times President of Section A. I wonder what the members of 
the organising committee of Section G would think if the President, in 
addition to reading his address, offered to contribute twelve papers to the 
Proceedings of the Section: this is what Kelvin did as President of Sec- 
tion A at the Glasgow Meeting in 1876. I can find no record of his taking 
any part in the proceedings of Section G, although his brother, James 
Thomson, was President of the Section at the Belfast Meeting in 1874. 
If any one event can be regarded as the birth of electrical engineering, 
it is surely the discovery by Faraday in 1821 of the principle of the electro- 
motor; that is, that a conductor carrying a current in a magnetic field 
experiences a force tending to move it. It is noteworthy that ten years 
elapsed before Faraday discovered, in 1831, magneto-electric induction ; 
that is, the principle of the dynamo. Four years later, Sturgeon added 
the commutator or ‘ uniodirective discharger,’ as he called it, and in 1845 
