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Description: | none MANU Unsigned. circa 1881 Kelvin's Workshop, Glasgow University, Glasgow, Scotland. This is a specimen of lighting cable from Kelvin's Lecture theatre which was in the arts quadrangle of the Gilbert Scott Building which was completed in 1870. It was removed, in 1965, from the History Department which had taken over that part of the building sometime after the completion of new Natural Philosophy deparment in the Kelvin building. Work on the new building began in1904 and it was completed in 1906 much to the dismay of Lord Kelvin who thought the existing facilities were quite adequate. The old lecture theatre space is now the University Senate room. The cable is constructed from a single strand of copper wire dipped in a ?wax coating and then wrapped in a single strip of waxed cloth (possibly linen) wound in a spiral around the core. It is interesting to note that Kelvin's first patent, No. 2547, Thomsom and Rankine, of 1854, was for multi-stranded condutors for the improvement of telegraph signals and that the power was supplied to the lamps, at least in part, by such a cable (see GLAHM 113588). Kelvin's house was possibly the first in the world to be entirely lit by electric carbon filament lamps. There appear to be a few contenders for this distinction. R.E.B. Crompton installed a commercial carbon arc system to light St Enoch's station in Glasgow in 1879. Crompton was a pioneer of electric lighting and founder of Crompton & Co., and the Kensington and Knightsbridge Electric Supply Company which was formed in 1886. Whilst in Glasgow he met Kelvin, who was also a keen advocate of electric lighting, who suggested improvements to the positioning of the arc lamps and design changes to the imported Gramme dynamos used in the system. Crompton first displayed a complete commercial lighting system, using Swan filament lamps, at a Glasgow trade exhibition in the summer of 1880 . This led to Crompton winning the contracts to light the Post Office and Queen Street station in Glasgow. These projects were completed in early 1881. There were some temporary domestic installations, using metal filament lamps in London, in 1881, however, they failed due to lack of efficiency. There was an installation in a house in Romford, Essex, which was supplied by Crompton, in November 1881, and an installation in the mansion at Craigside, Northumberland, belonging to Lord Armstrong, the armements manufacturer. It consisted of 46 lamps powered by an hydro-electric plant on the estate. It seems unlikely that these systems were complete replacements of the existing lighting. On the 22nd of December Kelvin wrote to his friend, William Ewart Gladstone, mentioning that he had wired his house 'from attic to cellar' and was on the point of lighting his laboratory, lecture room and house with Swan and Edison lamps.The project, in Kelvin's residence at number 11 Professor's Square, was begun in June and completed in December 1881. It involved the replacement the original gas lamps by 106 Swan 85 volt 16 candle lamps. By February of 1882 he had installed a similar 12 lamp sytem in his laboratory, 52 lamp system in his lecture theatre and a ten lamp system in the Senate room. Kelvin had been invited by J. Swan, in 1880, to be a consultant to his company, Kelvin declined an offtcial position, but volunteered his services testing the lamps in his own laboratory. The lamps at number 11 were powered by a battery of 120 Faure cells, arranged in three parallels, which were maintained by a Siemens shunt wound dynamo run by a Clerk gas engine installed in his laboratory. He could operate 40 lamps from the battery alone and from 70 to 80 lamps with the combined battery and dynamo. The electrification of the lighting system, in the lecture theatre, was completed by February of 1882. Kelvin was reported ,in 'The Times' May 16th 1881, to have taken delivery of one of the new Faure lead-acid accumulators which he had been asked to evaluate. Later that month, when confined to bed with a recurring leg injury, sustained when he broke his leg curling in Largs in 1860, he had a Swan lamp pinned to his bed post. It was powered by a Faure cell which he called his 'box of electricity'. Much impressed by this device he had more of them constructed in his own workshop. Faure cells had several compressed lead oxide powders sandwiched in thin lead grids instead of the normal solid lead plates of the Plante cell, which required 'forming'. This was a lengthy and therefore costly process of cycling the cell until the plates had become sufficiently spongy. This gave them the large surface area which enabled them to work at a reasonable efficiency. The main disadvatage of the Faure cell, with 'paste' plates, was that it was not as durable as a Plante cell with 'formed' plates. By June of 1881 Lady Thomson wrote to Charles Darwin informing him that they were not only planning to light the house but also Kelvin's yacht, the Lalla Rookh, which served as a travelling home and laboratory for inventions such as the dry compass and the depth sounder. Kelvin stated in a letter to Sir William H. Preece, dated 16th March 1886 that the Faure cell battery, he had constructed, lasted for about 18 months before it was 'worked to death'. In November, 1885, he dispensed with the Faure cells and obtained a battery of Faure-Sellon-Volckmar cells from the Electric power Storage Company. Kelvin designed the circuits for the installations at the University including the fuses, switches and fixtures, between 1881 and 1884. He was most proud of a hanging suspension which converted a ceiling light into a reading lamp. In 1881 he also invented a new design of dynamo, that had zig zag armature windings and which was later improved by Ferranti . These dynamos were used in the first large scale electric generating stations. In 1883 on the 600th anniversary of his old Cambridge College Kelvin donated a complete lighting system to Peterhouse, which was similar to his own and still running in the 1900's. Kelvin made the claim that 'his house was the first house on the planet in which the whole of the lighting was done by electricity' in a speech in 1906. N.B. It wasn't until 1891, ten years after his first lighting project that Kelvin had an electricity meter which satisfied him. He started by developing a form of tangent galvanometer, which he called the lamp counter, but finally used a moving iron instrument coupled with a pendulum clock and mechanical integrator. | License: | http://www.hmag.gla.ac.uk/spirit/rights/ | Publisher: | Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery, University of Glasgow | Rights holder: | Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery, University of Glasgow | Subjects: | SCIENTIFIC COLLECTION : | Source: | Hunterian Museum | Creator: | Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery, University of Glasgow | Identifier: | http://www.huntsearch.gla.ac.uk/cgi-bin/... | Language: | en-GB | Go to resource |
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