It=92s a journey down the wires from the awe and opposition that greeted the first pylons in 1928 and the novelty of electric light, to the long lost glamour of the British nuclear industry and Margaret Thatcher=92s determination to keep power flowing during the miners=92 strike. Contributors include author Will Self, urban planner Sir Peter Hall and grid veterans on how Britain first banished darkness and turned on the electric light.
Owain
It?s a journey down the wires from the awe and opposition that greeted the first pylons in 1928 and the novelty of electric light, to the long lost glamour of the British nuclear industry and Margaret Thatcher?s determination to keep power flowing during the miners? strike. Contributors include author Will Self, urban planner Sir Peter Hall and grid veterans on how Britain first banished darkness and turned on the electric light.
Thanks for the heads up.
Peter Crosland
Are you saying that the UK got power for electric light some 20 years after Auckland NZ? :)
Of course not! Prior to the National grid the power generation was local and fragmented. The National grid saw a country wide electricity network of high voltage cables on pylons.
Peter Crosland
I can't see where he said that.
True, the National grid was a major step. But surely electric light was not a novelty by 1928.
It wasn't a novelty, but it wasn't a majority.
Gas lighting past end of WWII in some places.
:-)
Godalming had street lighting in 1881 and there was a limited scheme supplying several shops in Brighton in the same year.
I think the BBC have confused the National Grid, the purpose of which was to cheapen the cost of electricity by using the most efficient generators, and the various electrification schemes which developed the LV and MV distribution networks and brought the novelty of mains electricity to the masses.
The International Council on Large Electric Systems was founded in
1921 as an international non-government organization with the aim to distribute technological knowledge on the generation and transmission of high voltage electricity. In 1923, the Scottish engineer Daniel Dunlop established the World Power Conference (WPC), a platform where international energy expert could meet and discuss electrification of Europe. The first congress, held in London in 1924, attracted 1700 delegates from over 40 countries.
My local railway station (Ewell West) had gas lighting until about 1960
countries.http://www.zum.de/whkmla/sp/0809/kyungmook/km2.htmlI think Auckland only got power for electric lights because they needed to generate power for electric trams around 1906. They used coal-burning steam engines to drive the generators. Much like this but bigger:)
Our road still (We moved) had it in 2008...
Thanks for the heads up, note that the above is the first of three parts.
IIRC (from a visit to the Pepperpot) The cables were laid in the gutters.
yeah but that was to protect jobs in the wheel tappers shunters and gas lighters union.
There's a pub in Beverley that still has gas lighting (and cheap beer).
I believe some of the stations had contracts at very good rates, making it sensible to continue using gas for a long time; there were certainly some inner London stations which I passed through in the
70's which were still gas lit, although that's no longer the case. Maybe the contracts lapsed with privatisation of British Gas? There are also some areas of London (I remember seeing it last year in streets off the Strand) which are still gas lit. Incidentally, when I bought my first house (built around 1904) I was told that it was only connected to mains electricity in 1948 - just long enough before I bought it to require a total rewire. Mike
Perhaps gaslit stations that hadn't already been converted were phased out when natural gas was introduced? How well would natural gas lamps fare outside? Would the much lower pressure make them unreliable?
The house I grew up in was partly gaslit and the house next door had no electricity supply at all until the last member of the family died and the house was sold (about 1960).
A new pub built near me in the late 70s used gas lighting along the bar. It had quite low ceilings, so the lights were only just above head height. I was standing there one day and a chap in his early twenties, standing beside me, looked up at one of them and then, without warning, reached up and grabbed the mantle between finger and thumb! He'd never seen a gas lamp before ...
I haven't been near it for years so I don't know if they're still there.
Strangely, at about the same time that this pub was built, another local pub, dating back to late Victorian days, was re-fitted and the gas lamps over the barreplaced by electric lighting though, at about 8' above the floor, they were well beyond the range of curious fingers ...
(I think, in both cases, the gas lamps also fulfilled the function of emergency lightning.)
Not bad. I wonder if there was a surge as we all logged back on after the programme ended?
Pylons are certainly robust jobs - they don't seem to need much maintenance - the odd coat of paint - but I have never seen corroded sections being replaced.
They showed the original design for Battersea with 8 chimneys in a row, but then jumped straight to the "iconic" four chimneys version, missing out the stage where the "A" plant had been built with two chimneys before the "B" plant added another two about 20 years later
We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember Andy Burns saying something like:
Could have been worse, for a technically-oriented programme produced by arty-farty types. Very short on technical detail, I thought.
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