An Irish gate-crasher born 150 years ago this month helped spread the use of electricity by developing a new type of turbine, writes Mary Mulvihill.
You could say that Charles Parsons changed the world. In 1884 he invented the steam turbine, making cheap and plentiful electricity possible and revolutionising marine transport and naval warfare. The world would never be the same again, and had it not been for Parsons, we might still be using gaslights and gas-powered appliances.
Parsons's interest in steam and engineering began as a boy at home. His was no ordinary home however but Birr Castle in Co Offaly, where his father William, the Earl of Rosse, had built the world's biggest telescope in 1845.
The earl was keen on steam, and his many steam-powered machines included an early steam carriage and a machine to polish the metal mirrors for his telescope. Charles spent time in his father's workshops, designing and making his own machines, and it seemed only natural that, after studying at Cambridge, he should become an apprentice in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England's great engineering city.
Conventional steam engines had powered industry since the 1750s, employing steam to move pistons and crankshafts. Inefficient, noisy, slow behemoths that consumed prodigious amounts of coal, they were also costly to maintain, and vibrated violently, and people were starting to switch to quieter gas-powered engines.
Then in 1884, worried that fossil fuel reserves were running out, Charles Parsons invented a more efficient steam engine. Instead of using steam to drive pistons, Parsons had it turn a rotor directly. He allowed the steam to escape into an enclosed space in a controlled manner - albeit at 2,000 kilometres an hour.
Instead of harnessing the power all at once, Parsons had the ingenious idea of tapping it in stages as it expanded, by forcing it through a series of ever larger multi-vaned wheels. Steam passing over the vanes turned each wheel in turn and thus the central axle rotor, and in this way, harnessed most of the energy.
His first model spun at an unprecedented 20,000 rpm and generated seven kilowatts. Power stations quickly spotted the design's potential for turning the dynamos used in generating electricity, and it was Charles's turbine that facilitated widespread electrification.
Parsons started a company (now called NEI Parsons Group) and refined his design, improving efficiency each time. He tried to interest the British navy in turbine-powered ships, but they scoffed at his idea. Undaunted, Parsons built a demonstration boat, Turbinia, a sleek lightweight vessel 30 metres long and just two metres wide, designed for speed.
Initial trials were disappointing until experiments revealed that, ironically, the boat's propeller was turning so fast it was creating vacuum cavities in the surrounding water that were slowing it down. Parsons built the world's first cavitation tunnel to investigate the phenomenon and improve the propeller's design, work that was later adapted to improve aeroplane propellers.
By 1897 Turbinia was ready and Parsons ventured a daring marketing ploy: gate-crashing Queen Victoria's diamond jubilee naval review, where 150 vessels had gathered. The small uninvited guest steamed through the party at a record 34.5 knots (64 kilometres per hour), and nothing could catch it. A suitably impressed Navy promptly ordered two turbine-powered destroyers.
Parsons's turbine revolutionised marine transport. The first turbine-powered destroyer, HMS Dreadnought (1906), could do 21 knots and rendered all previous warships obsolete. Enormous ocean-going liners were now also possible. With conventional steam engines, a ship the size of Titanic would probably have sunk under the weight of the coal needed for a journey to the US.
Sir Charles Parsons was dubbed the most innovative British engineer since James Watt, and his many inventions included searchlight designs, non-skid chains for cars, and even a music amplifier. He also spent a fortune trying to make synthetic diamonds: subjecting carbon to high currents, melting graphite at extreme temperatures, even firing high-velocity bullets into carbon-rich material . . . all to no avail. Even so his experiments captured the public attention and he featured in a novel, Tom Swift among the Diamond Makers (1911).
In 1925 he took over a telescope company owned by another Irishman, Sir Howard Grubb, and the Grubb-Parsons company made telescopes for the world's top observatories until 1985. Parsons's own company, NEI Parsons, is still making turbines.
Sir Charles Parsons, the ingenious engineer from Birr Castle, who died in 1931, was born 150 years ago this month, in June 1854.
The historic Turbinia is centrepiece of an exhibition about Parsons at Newcastle-upon-Tyne's Discovery Museum.
Birr Castle visitor centre has an exhibition celebrating the work of the Parsons family, notably the 3rd earl's telescope, but also Charles Parsons's turbine.
TCD's engineering faculty has a small-scale demonstration Parsons turbine dating from the 1890s.