1871: That was the year that was

The year is 1871. Queen Victoria is on the throne and Liberal Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone is head of the 20th Parliament of the United Kingdom. It is the year that rugby football is invented, Bank Holidays are created and trade unions legalised. Workers in Tyneside are striking for a shorter working day, while the completion of the transglobal London-Australia telegraph cable creates a landmark event in communications technology by uniting the opposite sides of the world.

It is also the year that the Society of Telegraph Engineers is formed – the organisation that would become known as the IET. What was the state of engineering, what notable events shaped the world of technology during this year, and who were the main players?

Souter Lighthouse: let there be (electric) light

With its dramatic red and white hoops, Souter Lighthouse was the first such building to be powered using alternating electric (AC) current. Standing sentinel on the UK’s North Sea shipping lanes to the east of Newcastle upon Tyne, it was designed by English civil engineer and renowned lighthouse builder Sir James Douglass (of Eddystone fame). Souter was opened in 1871 in response to an increase in wrecks on the Whitburn Steel reefs (in 1860 alone there had been 20, making the stretch among the most dangerous waters for shipping in Britain). The original light was an 800,000 candle power carbon arc that could be seen from a distance of 26 miles (42km) with optics designed by industrialist Sir James Chance to produce one flash per minute. This technology had first been presented to the Royal Society in an 1860 lecture – ‘Magneto-Electric Light for Lighthouses’ – by Michael Faraday.

Lord Rayleigh: scatter-brained genius

John William Strutt was a classic 19th century career academic physicist at the University of Cambridge who went on to publish nearly 500 papers. While at Trinity College in 1871 he produced his well known theory on the subject of light scattering by small particles, which is now called ‘Rayleigh scattering’ (in 1872 Strutt succeeded his father, becoming the 3rd Baron Rayleigh – hence the term), which will be familiar to anyone who did physics in school. His 1871 paper ‘On the light from the sky, its polarization and colour’ essentially provides the answer to the question ‘why is the sky blue?’, which is, of course, due to blue light scattering more efficiently than red. Strutt went on to become one of the great scientists of his age and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1904 for his successful isolation of the inert atmospheric gas argon.

The Albert Hall: a princely memorial

The success of the 1851 Great Exhibition, held in London’s Hyde Park, led to its organiser Prince Consort Albert, husband to Queen Victoria, proposing plans for more permanent public facilities in the area of South Kensington informally known today as Albertopolis. A decade later Albert was dead and not much had come of his plans, although his death created the catalyst for a memorial, opposite which was to be created a ‘Great Hall’ to be called the Central Hall of Arts and Sciences. A further decade was to pass before Victoria inaugurated the (by now) renamed Royal Albert Hall of Arts and Sciences in 1871. One of its key architectural features is its massive dome created by English engineer Rowland Mason Ordish (who also designed the Albert Bridge). A trial assembly of the dome took place in Manchester, after which is was disassembled, taken to London by horse and cart and reassembled in situ by volunteers (in case the structure collapsed).

Curtis’ rowing machine: birth of modern gym equipment

Although accepted as the first modern rowing apparatus (more correctly ‘indoor rower’), evidence for attempts at land-based rowing simulation goes right back to the Ancient Greeks, in particular the Athenian admiral Chabrias (described by Demosthenes as the most successful commander Athens had ever seen), who introduced training aids to assist with the development of inexperienced oarsmen in order to learn practical techniques before going aboard ship. According to the author of ‘The History of the Indoor Rower’, Curtis’ innovation, in common with its 20th century successors, didn’t replicate the experience of rowing to any significant degree and was not sufficiently evolved to measure power output or any of the other metrics provided by today’s equipment that has a global market size of $1bn (£750m).

Richard Leach Maddox: pioneer of the photographic process

In an article published in the British Journal of Photography (8th September 1871) – ‘An Experiment with Gelatino-Bromide’ – English physician Richard Maddox laid out his proposal for a ‘dry substitute’ for the prevailing photographic process ‘wet collodion.’ The problem with wet collodion (that had been around for two decades) was that the ambrotypes it produced were simply bleached negatives that appeared positive when placed against a dark background. Another disadvantage was that wet collodion needed to be processed immediately after the exposure had been taken on the camera, and so the photographer needed a portable darkroom. Maddox’s idea for a chemical process that would allow for plates to be prepared in advance and developed much later led to industrial production of the much more convenient ‘dry’ plate, now considered to be the birth of modern photography, especially as Maddox’s innovation directly evolved into emulsion-covered photographic film.

Charles Babbage: ‘father of the computer’ dies

There is no inscription on Charles Babbage’s tomb that yields anything other than his name and the historical facts that he was born on 26th December 1791 and died on 18th October 1871. The tomb itself is in Kensal Green Cemetery, only a few miles north of London’s Science Museum where parts of Babbage’s incomplete mechanisms, that are now thought of as the ancestors of the digital programmable computer, are on display. During the mid-1830s Babbage developed plans for his ‘Analytical Engine’, a device capable of performing any arithmetical operation on the basis of instructions from punched cards, as well as many of the other basic functions of the present-day computer. And yet, Babbage, recognised as the ‘father of the computer’, was concerned that his work might not have the desired influence over the future of science, saying: “I live in a country which is incapable of estimating it.”

Orville Wright: aviation pioneer born

Orville, the younger of the two American aviation pioneers – the Wright brothers – came into this world in 1871, 32 years ahead of “the first powered, heavier-than-air machine to achieve controlled, sustained flight with a pilot aboard,” as described by the Smithsonian Institution. The historic flight took place on 17th December 1903 near the Kill Devil Hills a few miles south of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in an experimental ‘canard’ configuration biplane, manufactured by the Wright Cycle Company that was essentially the family bike repair franchise business. It was the brothers’ work in cycle engineering that led them to believe that a vehicle as fundamentally unstable as a prototype aeroplane could be controlled with operator practice. The Wright Flyer was put on display at the Smithsonian on 17th December 1948, forty-five years to the day after the aircraft’s only flights. Orville Wright did not live to witness the honour, having died in January of that year.

Transglobal telecoms: Europe sends news to Australia via cable

A key moment in linking Australia to the rest of the world via the international telegraph network took place in 1871 when a submarine cable was brought ashore at Darwin. Although just one point on a technology timeline spanning decades, it is significant because it marked the moment when the time taken for news written in Europe to arrive in Australia shrank from months to hours. The costs of sending messages via cable was exorbitant, and so to defray their outlay on the technology the Melbourne Argus and the Sydney Morning Herald decided to not just sell newspapers, but the news itself. They founded Associated Press that established a syndication subscription business model to supply other papers. Keen to protect their investment the newspapers lobbied for legal protection, with the result that 1871 also saw the first ever copyright legislation to protect electronically transmitted data.

Tooth-rack technology: first mountain railway in Europe

While public fare-paying steam railways had been established since the opening of the Liverpool & Manchester Railway in 1830, it wasn’t until 1871 that Europe got its first mountain railway. Switzerland’s original single-track Vitznau-Rigi railway extended 6.8km from Vitznau on the shores of Lake Lucerne (elevation 435m) to Rigi Kulm (1752m) close to the summit of Mount Rigi, a popular resort for hiking in summer and sliding sports during the winter. Because of the steep gradient, tooth-rack rail engineering was deployed to assist with grades of more than 10 percent (the maximum for friction-based rail technology). The system uses a supplementary rail (usually between the two friction rails) so that cogwheels or pinions fitted to the train can mesh with them. Modelled on the Mount Washington Cog Railway in the United States that had been established in 1868, the Vitznau-Rigi line still operates today.

Bridge on the river Parrett: the world’s only metal retractable bridge

Designed by railway engineer Francis Fox (not to be confused with the more eminent civil engineer Sir Francis Fox), the Bridgwater Telescopic Bridge (also known as the Black Bridge) in Somerset is the world’s only metal retractable bridge. Spanning the River Parrett, it is modelled on the only other known example of this type of bridge, Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s 1846 wooden telescopic bridge across the River Arun near Little Hampton in Sussex. Originally designed to give rail access to the floating dock, while allowing shipping to use the tidal stretch of the river, on its opening in 1871 the 39m bridge was manually operated for the first eight months before being powered by steam. It’s still there, and according to the Bridgwater Heritage Group, “some of the ruined mechanism can still be seen… when it is not overgrown with brambles.”

The age of iron ships and the portable hydraulic riveter

If the First Industrial Revolution of the early 19th century brought with it new manufacturing processes, then its successor, the so-called Second or Technological Revolution of the Victorian era ushered in machinery to sustain an increase in pace. The days of wooden-hulled vessels had yielded to steam-powered iron ships, while there was a sharp increase in metal bridge building. All of which needed rivets, wooden versions of which can be traced back to the shipyards of the Ancient Egyptians. In the 19th century though, there emerged a pressing requirement for a portable riveting machine so that the riveter could go to where it was needed rather than the work being taken to the riveter. A solution came in the form of British mechanical engineer Ralph Hart Tredwell’s portable hydraulic riveter. Invented in 1871, it became one of the great labour-saving industrial devices of the era.

Meyer’s developments in thermodynamics

In 1871, German chemist and physicist Julius von Meyer, pioneer in the field of thermodynamics, was awarded the Royal Society’s prestigious Copley Medal in recognition of his work in the field. Mayer (not to be confused with the chemist Julius Lothar Meyer who was one of the early developers of the Periodic Table), is today best known for producing one of the original statements of the conservation of energy, a de facto early version of the first law of thermodynamics that says energy can neither be created nor destroyed. While Mayer’s work on thermodynamics was ultimately overshadowed by that of English physicist (and brewer) James Joule (who virtually guaranteed his place in the history books by having the SI derived unit of energy, the ‘joule’, named after him), Mayer’s importance is also underlined by his work in oxidisation and photosynthesis.

Birth of Ernest Rutherford: ‘father of nuclear physics’

Born in New Zealand in 1871, the British physicist Ernest Rutherford’s early work included the discovery of the concept of radioactive half-live and the radioactive element radon. His later work, while director of the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge, included leading a team that predicted the existence of the neutron. In between, he developed the Rutherford model of the atom and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Further awards and honours followed as he became President of the Royal Society, was awarded the Order of Merit (a personal gift of the Sovereign), knighted and raised to the peerage. His influence on science was so profound that a chemical element was named after him (rutherfordium), while the ashes of Ernest, 1st Baron Rutherford of Nelson are buried in Westminster Abbey alongside those of Sir Isaac Newton and Lord Kelvin.

Britain’s railway station building programme takes off

By Queen Victoria’s time, Britain’s rail network was growing so quickly that in 1871 alone no fewer than 108 stations opened, ranging from the modest-in-scale and long-forgotten, such as the Cefn Onn Halt on the Rhymney line in South Wales, to icons of railway architecture such as the London Underground station at South Kensington, that is currently being brought into the 21st century with a large-scale restoration and modernisation programme for its original buildings. Following the Metropolitan Railway (known today as the Metropolitan Line) opening on Christmas Eve 1868, the station as we know it today was completed in 1871 by the addition of the District Railway lines (District Line). This ushered in a phase of continual development that was to include in 1885 an extended pedestrian subway running beneath Exhibition Road connecting the station to the newly-built museums of Albertopolis.

Sir Joseph Bazalgette: London’s chief engineer

There are few engineers that have had a more profound effect on London than Sir Joseph Bazalgette, the British civil engineer that designed the main drainage system for London and in the process saved the city from persistent cholera outbreaks that had caused thousands of deaths in overcrowded and unsanitary 19th century London. In reaction to the ‘Great Stink’ of 1858 that was emanating from the River Thames, the British government finally released funds for Bazalgette to build an extensive underground sewer network that diverted London’s waste downstream to the Thames Estuary. The gargantuan project required the construction of 1,300 miles of sewers, 82 miles of intercepting sewers and the use of 320 million bricks and was executed during the decade 1865-1875. It also included the construction of the Chelsea Embankment (1871-74), as well as both Victoria and Albert embankments (1864-70) and, of course, the Victoria Embankment Gardens opposite the IET’s headquarters in Savoy Place.

 

The year is 1871. Queen Victoria is on the throne and Liberal Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone is head of the 20th Parliament of the United Kingdom. It is the year that rugby football is invented, Bank Holidays are created and trade unions legalised. Workers in Tyneside are striking for a shorter working day, while the completion of the transglobal London-Australia telegraph cable creates a landmark event in communications technology by uniting the opposite sides of the world.

It is also the year that the Society of Telegraph Engineers is formed – the organisation that would become known as the IET. What was the state of engineering, what notable events shaped the world of technology during this year, and who were the main players?

Souter Lighthouse: let there be (electric) light

With its dramatic red and white hoops, Souter Lighthouse was the first such building to be powered using alternating electric (AC) current. Standing sentinel on the UK’s North Sea shipping lanes to the east of Newcastle upon Tyne, it was designed by English civil engineer and renowned lighthouse builder Sir James Douglass (of Eddystone fame). Souter was opened in 1871 in response to an increase in wrecks on the Whitburn Steel reefs (in 1860 alone there had been 20, making the stretch among the most dangerous waters for shipping in Britain). The original light was an 800,000 candle power carbon arc that could be seen from a distance of 26 miles (42km) with optics designed by industrialist Sir James Chance to produce one flash per minute. This technology had first been presented to the Royal Society in an 1860 lecture – ‘Magneto-Electric Light for Lighthouses’ – by Michael Faraday.

Lord Rayleigh: scatter-brained genius

John William Strutt was a classic 19th century career academic physicist at the University of Cambridge who went on to publish nearly 500 papers. While at Trinity College in 1871 he produced his well known theory on the subject of light scattering by small particles, which is now called ‘Rayleigh scattering’ (in 1872 Strutt succeeded his father, becoming the 3rd Baron Rayleigh – hence the term), which will be familiar to anyone who did physics in school. His 1871 paper ‘On the light from the sky, its polarization and colour’ essentially provides the answer to the question ‘why is the sky blue?’, which is, of course, due to blue light scattering more efficiently than red. Strutt went on to become one of the great scientists of his age and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1904 for his successful isolation of the inert atmospheric gas argon.

The Albert Hall: a princely memorial

The success of the 1851 Great Exhibition, held in London’s Hyde Park, led to its organiser Prince Consort Albert, husband to Queen Victoria, proposing plans for more permanent public facilities in the area of South Kensington informally known today as Albertopolis. A decade later Albert was dead and not much had come of his plans, although his death created the catalyst for a memorial, opposite which was to be created a ‘Great Hall’ to be called the Central Hall of Arts and Sciences. A further decade was to pass before Victoria inaugurated the (by now) renamed Royal Albert Hall of Arts and Sciences in 1871. One of its key architectural features is its massive dome created by English engineer Rowland Mason Ordish (who also designed the Albert Bridge). A trial assembly of the dome took place in Manchester, after which is was disassembled, taken to London by horse and cart and reassembled in situ by volunteers (in case the structure collapsed).

Curtis’ rowing machine: birth of modern gym equipment

Although accepted as the first modern rowing apparatus (more correctly ‘indoor rower’), evidence for attempts at land-based rowing simulation goes right back to the Ancient Greeks, in particular the Athenian admiral Chabrias (described by Demosthenes as the most successful commander Athens had ever seen), who introduced training aids to assist with the development of inexperienced oarsmen in order to learn practical techniques before going aboard ship. According to the author of ‘The History of the Indoor Rower’, Curtis’ innovation, in common with its 20th century successors, didn’t replicate the experience of rowing to any significant degree and was not sufficiently evolved to measure power output or any of the other metrics provided by today’s equipment that has a global market size of $1bn (£750m).

Richard Leach Maddox: pioneer of the photographic process

In an article published in the British Journal of Photography (8th September 1871) – ‘An Experiment with Gelatino-Bromide’ – English physician Richard Maddox laid out his proposal for a ‘dry substitute’ for the prevailing photographic process ‘wet collodion.’ The problem with wet collodion (that had been around for two decades) was that the ambrotypes it produced were simply bleached negatives that appeared positive when placed against a dark background. Another disadvantage was that wet collodion needed to be processed immediately after the exposure had been taken on the camera, and so the photographer needed a portable darkroom. Maddox’s idea for a chemical process that would allow for plates to be prepared in advance and developed much later led to industrial production of the much more convenient ‘dry’ plate, now considered to be the birth of modern photography, especially as Maddox’s innovation directly evolved into emulsion-covered photographic film.

Charles Babbage: ‘father of the computer’ dies

There is no inscription on Charles Babbage’s tomb that yields anything other than his name and the historical facts that he was born on 26th December 1791 and died on 18th October 1871. The tomb itself is in Kensal Green Cemetery, only a few miles north of London’s Science Museum where parts of Babbage’s incomplete mechanisms, that are now thought of as the ancestors of the digital programmable computer, are on display. During the mid-1830s Babbage developed plans for his ‘Analytical Engine’, a device capable of performing any arithmetical operation on the basis of instructions from punched cards, as well as many of the other basic functions of the present-day computer. And yet, Babbage, recognised as the ‘father of the computer’, was concerned that his work might not have the desired influence over the future of science, saying: “I live in a country which is incapable of estimating it.”

Orville Wright: aviation pioneer born

Orville, the younger of the two American aviation pioneers – the Wright brothers – came into this world in 1871, 32 years ahead of “the first powered, heavier-than-air machine to achieve controlled, sustained flight with a pilot aboard,” as described by the Smithsonian Institution. The historic flight took place on 17th December 1903 near the Kill Devil Hills a few miles south of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in an experimental ‘canard’ configuration biplane, manufactured by the Wright Cycle Company that was essentially the family bike repair franchise business. It was the brothers’ work in cycle engineering that led them to believe that a vehicle as fundamentally unstable as a prototype aeroplane could be controlled with operator practice. The Wright Flyer was put on display at the Smithsonian on 17th December 1948, forty-five years to the day after the aircraft’s only flights. Orville Wright did not live to witness the honour, having died in January of that year.

Transglobal telecoms: Europe sends news to Australia via cable

A key moment in linking Australia to the rest of the world via the international telegraph network took place in 1871 when a submarine cable was brought ashore at Darwin. Although just one point on a technology timeline spanning decades, it is significant because it marked the moment when the time taken for news written in Europe to arrive in Australia shrank from months to hours. The costs of sending messages via cable was exorbitant, and so to defray their outlay on the technology the Melbourne Argus and the Sydney Morning Herald decided to not just sell newspapers, but the news itself. They founded Associated Press that established a syndication subscription business model to supply other papers. Keen to protect their investment the newspapers lobbied for legal protection, with the result that 1871 also saw the first ever copyright legislation to protect electronically transmitted data.

Tooth-rack technology: first mountain railway in Europe

While public fare-paying steam railways had been established since the opening of the Liverpool & Manchester Railway in 1830, it wasn’t until 1871 that Europe got its first mountain railway. Switzerland’s original single-track Vitznau-Rigi railway extended 6.8km from Vitznau on the shores of Lake Lucerne (elevation 435m) to Rigi Kulm (1752m) close to the summit of Mount Rigi, a popular resort for hiking in summer and sliding sports during the winter. Because of the steep gradient, tooth-rack rail engineering was deployed to assist with grades of more than 10 percent (the maximum for friction-based rail technology). The system uses a supplementary rail (usually between the two friction rails) so that cogwheels or pinions fitted to the train can mesh with them. Modelled on the Mount Washington Cog Railway in the United States that had been established in 1868, the Vitznau-Rigi line still operates today.

Bridge on the river Parrett: the world’s only metal retractable bridge

Designed by railway engineer Francis Fox (not to be confused with the more eminent civil engineer Sir Francis Fox), the Bridgwater Telescopic Bridge (also known as the Black Bridge) in Somerset is the world’s only metal retractable bridge. Spanning the River Parrett, it is modelled on the only other known example of this type of bridge, Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s 1846 wooden telescopic bridge across the River Arun near Little Hampton in Sussex. Originally designed to give rail access to the floating dock, while allowing shipping to use the tidal stretch of the river, on its opening in 1871 the 39m bridge was manually operated for the first eight months before being powered by steam. It’s still there, and according to the Bridgwater Heritage Group, “some of the ruined mechanism can still be seen… when it is not overgrown with brambles.”

The age of iron ships and the portable hydraulic riveter

If the First Industrial Revolution of the early 19th century brought with it new manufacturing processes, then its successor, the so-called Second or Technological Revolution of the Victorian era ushered in machinery to sustain an increase in pace. The days of wooden-hulled vessels had yielded to steam-powered iron ships, while there was a sharp increase in metal bridge building. All of which needed rivets, wooden versions of which can be traced back to the shipyards of the Ancient Egyptians. In the 19th century though, there emerged a pressing requirement for a portable riveting machine so that the riveter could go to where it was needed rather than the work being taken to the riveter. A solution came in the form of British mechanical engineer Ralph Hart Tredwell’s portable hydraulic riveter. Invented in 1871, it became one of the great labour-saving industrial devices of the era.

Meyer’s developments in thermodynamics

In 1871, German chemist and physicist Julius von Meyer, pioneer in the field of thermodynamics, was awarded the Royal Society’s prestigious Copley Medal in recognition of his work in the field. Mayer (not to be confused with the chemist Julius Lothar Meyer who was one of the early developers of the Periodic Table), is today best known for producing one of the original statements of the conservation of energy, a de facto early version of the first law of thermodynamics that says energy can neither be created nor destroyed. While Mayer’s work on thermodynamics was ultimately overshadowed by that of English physicist (and brewer) James Joule (who virtually guaranteed his place in the history books by having the SI derived unit of energy, the ‘joule’, named after him), Mayer’s importance is also underlined by his work in oxidisation and photosynthesis.

Birth of Ernest Rutherford: ‘father of nuclear physics’

Born in New Zealand in 1871, the British physicist Ernest Rutherford’s early work included the discovery of the concept of radioactive half-live and the radioactive element radon. His later work, while director of the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge, included leading a team that predicted the existence of the neutron. In between, he developed the Rutherford model of the atom and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Further awards and honours followed as he became President of the Royal Society, was awarded the Order of Merit (a personal gift of the Sovereign), knighted and raised to the peerage. His influence on science was so profound that a chemical element was named after him (rutherfordium), while the ashes of Ernest, 1st Baron Rutherford of Nelson are buried in Westminster Abbey alongside those of Sir Isaac Newton and Lord Kelvin.

Britain’s railway station building programme takes off

By Queen Victoria’s time, Britain’s rail network was growing so quickly that in 1871 alone no fewer than 108 stations opened, ranging from the modest-in-scale and long-forgotten, such as the Cefn Onn Halt on the Rhymney line in South Wales, to icons of railway architecture such as the London Underground station at South Kensington, that is currently being brought into the 21st century with a large-scale restoration and modernisation programme for its original buildings. Following the Metropolitan Railway (known today as the Metropolitan Line) opening on Christmas Eve 1868, the station as we know it today was completed in 1871 by the addition of the District Railway lines (District Line). This ushered in a phase of continual development that was to include in 1885 an extended pedestrian subway running beneath Exhibition Road connecting the station to the newly-built museums of Albertopolis.

Sir Joseph Bazalgette: London’s chief engineer

There are few engineers that have had a more profound effect on London than Sir Joseph Bazalgette, the British civil engineer that designed the main drainage system for London and in the process saved the city from persistent cholera outbreaks that had caused thousands of deaths in overcrowded and unsanitary 19th century London. In reaction to the ‘Great Stink’ of 1858 that was emanating from the River Thames, the British government finally released funds for Bazalgette to build an extensive underground sewer network that diverted London’s waste downstream to the Thames Estuary. The gargantuan project required the construction of 1,300 miles of sewers, 82 miles of intercepting sewers and the use of 320 million bricks and was executed during the decade 1865-1875. It also included the construction of the Chelsea Embankment (1871-74), as well as both Victoria and Albert embankments (1864-70) and, of course, the Victoria Embankment Gardens opposite the IET’s headquarters in Savoy Place.

 

Nick Smithhttps://eandt.theiet.org/rss

https://eandt.theiet.org/content/articles/2020/09/1871-that-was-the-year-that-was/

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