Explaining experimental electricity: animations at Cragside

As the project draws to a close we are polishing up our outputs ready for final delivery.  One of the outputs which we are producing for Cragside is a set of three bespoke educational animations to help volunteers to explain Cragside’s electrical heritage to visitors.  The animations have been produced by our undergraduate animation intern, Alex, and will be used to demonstrate how Lord Armstrong employed and experimented with electricity at Cragside, and how he used the surrounding landscape to generate hydroelectricity to light his house – the first private house to do so.

Of the three animations, one illustrates how the house’s iconic cloisonné lamps were originally electrified in December 1880.  This was a little unusual and can be hard to explain.  The only source we have is a letter Armstrong wrote to the Engineer in January 1881, in which he explained that the lamps could be switched off or on by picking them up and putting them down again.  As this was a very experimental period in the history of electrification, before switches were readily available, this was accomplished using a dish of mercury.

A wire ran down from the bulb at the top of the vase, and dipped into the mercury.  The dish was set in the centre of a metal disc connected to two wires: one carrying current to the bulb, and the other being the return wire for the circuit.  The metal body of the vase itself – copper – served to return the current back to the return wire.  Thus, when the vase was placed on the metal disc and the wire from the bulb dipped into the dish of mercury the circuit was completed and the bulb was lit.  Lifting the vase from the metal disc would have switched the light off.  As the cloisonne vases were coated entirely in enamel it is likely that this would have provided sufficient insulation for the vases to have been moved by hand.  The animation provides volunteers with a very visual way of explaining this process.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tq2G4JIWbEw]

 

The second animation is of the arc light which used to hang in the Picture Gallery at Cragside between c1878 and 1880 – when Armstrong and Joseph Swan installed Swan’s bulbs.  This can no longer be seen at the property, but the animation gives an idea of how it worked – including the noise of operating it.  The animation demonstrates how early arc lights comprised two vertical rods of carbon in an electrical circuit, separated by a gap.  The current jumped across the gap, creating a bright arc.  The distance between the two rods needed to be carefully regulated: if it was too small, the arc would correspondingly be too small to generate sufficient light.  If the gap was too wide, the current would not be able to arc across it.  However, as the rods burned away with use it was important to have a mechanism which automatically moved the rods to keep the gap the same size as the rods became shorter.  Arc lights were more commonly used for outdoor lighting, and not many people experimented with bringing them inside to illuminate their rooms.  This, alongside the cloisonne animation, therefore helps to highlight Armstrong’s willingness to experiment and innovate.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O83e71MJ2H8]

 

The final animation shows how the hydroelectric system at Cragside worked, with water running down the hill from a man-made lake at the top, and operating a dynamo in the Power House – a separate building containing the dynamos and the batteries, which stored excess electrical charge for periods of high demand.  When more current was required to light more rooms, the butler used a telephone to ring down to the Power House to request more power.  The animation shows this simply as the movement of a lever: this operation might have been performed by switching resistance coils out of the circuit (thus decreasing the resistance and effectively making more current available for the lights in the house), or by switching the batteries into the circuit.  After this happens in the animation we see more lights coming on in the house, represented by the cloisonné lamp in the Library, until it is entirely illuminated.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyZHEZtoQ_Y]

 

Volunteers will have these animations on tablets, and will be able to use them as explanatory tools when discussing the history of electricity at the property with visitors.  The role of volunteers in providing explanatory interpretative content is very important at Cragside, as at many other country houses.  When discussing how the project could deliver outputs which would best benefit Cragside, representatives of the house were keen to produce something which emphasised the role of volunteers, rather than written interpretative content such as panels or trails.

When drawing up the storyboards for each of the three animations, therefore, Alex and I consulted with Cragside staff in order ensure that the content was accurate and suitable for this purpose: the animations needed to be short – concise and focused without distracting elements – and visual, without relying on text.  The animations will be in use at Cragside in the next month, and will also be available to view online.

[Edit, 4/7/16 – This post now contains final versions of all three of the animations.  Please also see our Downloads page for further supporting information on these animations.]

Back to school: field-testing our KS2 digital interactive

On Monday 30 November Abigail Harrison-Moore and I will be joining a year 6 class (age 10-11) for a lesson to teach them about our work and test our educational materials. This is the age group at which we are aiming our online digital interactive, and as one of their science topics this year is electricity, this will give us an opportunity to integrate elements of history and art and design into their learning.

The design of our interactive focuses around floor plans of each of our three partner houses. At the beginning of the interactive, pupils will see a screen with pictures of each house, and will be prompted to move through the sections (levels) of the interactive which correspond to each of the houses in the order in which the houses were electrified (Cragside first, then Standen, as one of the first houses in the country to be built with electricity from the beginning, and finally Lotherton Hall, electrified in 1903).

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Two lamps in the Library at Cragside.

They will be able to select the first, Cragside, and on doing so will see a simplified floor plan of the house and a video introducing them to the guide character for the house. These guide characters, one for each house, will appear in videos throughout each house‘s section, or level, explaining content about the history of electricity. The guide characters, a butler for Cragside, the lady of the house, Mrs. Beale, for Standen, and a maid for Lotherton, will be played by drama students working on the Electrified musical. They will be filmed using green screen techniques and inserted into footage from each of the three houses.

Within the floor plan of each house will be four clickable rooms which pupils can select, in no set order. On selecting a room a large, wide angle photograph of the interior of the room will be displayed, and pupils will look for a hotspot within the picture. This will highlight an object in the room of electrical significance, and hovering over the hotspot will open a larger picture of the object accompanied by a question. Clicking on the question will then open a short video – 60 seconds – in which the guide character will answer the question and provide more information about the object or system to which it relates.

The questions, and their corresponding answers, will be focused around a different theme for each house. For Cragside, the theme will be science and technology; pupils will be encouraged to think about how objects and systems worked within the house, and will be introduced to circuit diagram symbols. This ties the interactive into the KS2 science curriculum. In Standen, the theme is aesthetics. One of the key novelties at Standen is the fact that electricity was built into the plans from the beginning, and thus light fittings were designed and selected iteratively to fit with the rest of the interior décor. Pupils will be prompted to consider how materials were chosen for this, and how electric lighting changed the look of a room. Lotherton represents a broader category of houses which adopted electricity slightly later, at the turn of the twentieth-century, and the theme of the questions and answers will be the social history of electricity: what different people thought of it depending on age, class and gender.

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A light fitting from Mrs. Gascoigne’s Morning Room, as compared with…
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…the lights in her husband Colonel Gascoigne’s office (the Medal Room).

The rooms have been selected to give a range of masculine and feminine rooms – such as Colonel Gascoigne‘s Medal Room or office at Lotherton Hall, and correspondingly Mrs. Gascoigne‘s Boudoir or Morning Room – and family and servant areas, such as the kitchen at Standen or butler‘s pantry at Cragside. Otherwise the clickable rooms represent the range of rooms found in a typical country house: dining room, drawing room, morning room, library, hall, kitchen.

Once the pupils have completed each of the houses in order, there will be a section which tests their understanding of the content they have just watched by asking a set of multiple choice questions. These questions will be positioned beneath an image of a circuit diagram, and each question will relate to a circuit component covered in the material over the course of the interactive. Each correct answer will place a component on the circuit diagram, and at the end, if all questions have been answered correctly, the pupil will be able to click a button to activate the circuit, for example lighting up a bulb, ringing a bell and causing a motor to turn.

We envision the interactive being used both at home and in a classroom environment. At home, the pupil would simply go through it as described above. This should take no more than 20 minutes if all the materials are viewed. In the classroom, the interactive can be projected on a large screen as a whole-class activity, and the teacher can guide the pupils through it. A pupil can be called up to select the hotspot in each room, thus involving 12 pupils in total over the course of the interactive (four rooms with one question each per house). When the question is displayed, the teacher can ask the pupils to suggest answers before clicking on it to show the video. Alternatively the teacher can pick just one of the houses to cover in this way, for example if a visit is planned or if one of the house themes is a particularly good fit with their teaching. We also intend to provide supporting resources for teachers using the interactive in this way, including information about each of the country houses, photographs used in the interactive, and further follow-up activities such as a worksheet and suggestions for related drama activities.

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Candles on the table in the Dining Room at Standen.

Thanks to Leeds Media Services, with whom we are working to produce the video content for the interactive, and to our technical officer Corey Benson, who is developing the interactive itself, we will be able to use this opportunity in the classroom to demonstrate a simple, limited version of some of the interactive content to get some feedback from the pupils and their teacher. We will then be able to incorporate this into the character scripts, which will be filmed in December.

The Cragside Chronicles

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Graeme and me on our way to Cragside!

Over the past two weeks I’ve made a couple of trips up to one of our partner houses, Cragside, near Rothbury in Northumberland. I’ve met members of staff (including Katherine the house steward and Andrew the curator, both of whom have been very friendly and helpful), found things to film for the digital interactive (on which more here) and decided on electrical items to be animated for use around the house.

The digital interactive will tell the story of all three of our partner houses, drawing out common themes in the history of electrification as noted in the Principal Investigator Graeme Gooday’s book, Domesticating Electricity, on which this project is based. These themes will include the aesthetics of electric lighting, how electricity was used for communication, and how early electrical lighting systems were often unreliable. Where possible, we intend to illustrate these themes, and rooms in the houses to which they relate, with video footage, so it was important to look around and see what we should film. Here I was grateful to have my friend and colleague Paul with me taking photographs, while I furiously scribbled partially legible notes on my little pad.

A fire alarm in the Owl Suite.

A fire alarm in the Owl Suite. ©Paul Coleman

For example, did you know Cragside has two electric dinner gongs upstairs, which were operated by the butler from downstairs to let everyone know it was time for tea? The house was so big you wouldn’t have heard the normal gong at the bottom of the stairs! The old fire alarms are also a very practical and a very attractive technology, especially the one installed in the Owl Suite of bedrooms, where the Prince and Princess of Wales and their children stayed whilst staying at Cragside in August 1884. I can imagine it might have been a little too easy to set these off by accident though!

The animations we will produce will be cartoon-style explanations of various electrical items and systems around the house and wider estate. They will be used on tablets by volunteers and staff to show to visitors. For example, in the library are four vases which were originally oil lamps, but were converted over to use Joseph Swan’s lightbulbs in 1880, making them some of the very first such electric lamps. As there was no effective electric lightswitch yet, these lamps sat on a base which contained a small cup of mercury. When the wire which came down from the bulb through the vase dipped into the mercury, the lamps lit up; when the vases were moved, the bulbs went out. I don’t think you’d want one of those in your house today! We will also be animating the hydroelectric system to demonstrate how it worked, as well as the telephone system which was used by the butler to regulate the supply of electricity to the house.

The view from the Tower at Cragside.

Blessed with lovely weather on both of my visits, it was very useful to walk around the grounds and get a feel for the layout and the scale of the estate. On my second visit, with Graeme Gooday, the curator Andrew took us up to the top of the house to the tower, not normally seen by visitors. The view was fantastic. I also need to thank Andrew in particular for the treasure trove of primary sources he’s given me to read through, and which I’m very grateful to have. Over the course of the project I hope that maybe I can add to this, possibly by going through volumes of old electrical journals like the Electrician and the Telegraphic Journal and Electrical Review to find references to Cragside and Lord Armstrong from the 1880s and 1890s.

Later, Mark, the Cragside representative on the project, and Andrew took Graeme and myself up to the lake at the top of the hill. Armstrong had this lake built around 1886 to provide a supply of water for the turbine which, connected to a dynamo, provided electricity to light the house. This was the second major stage in a project which had begun at the other end of the estate in around 1878; however, the original hydroelectric generating system had been too far from the house and wasn’t efficient enough to deal with the increasing demand as Armstrong installed more lights, so he built a second, closer, generating system.

The lake which powered the electric lighting from 1886.

The lake which powered the electric lighting from 1886.

As you can just about make out from the photo, the view of the otherwise idyllic landscape also includes a couple of electricity pylons lurking in the background, marching their wires across the rolling hills. Some might consider this a rather unfortunate juxtaposition of natural beauty and artificial unsightliness. However, as Andrew pointed out, given Lord Armstrong’s passion for electrification, and pioneering efforts in providing electricity at a distance, maybe this symbol of progress and electrical infrastructure, forming the backdrop to a view of Armstrong’s own early attempts, is really rather appropriate.

I came back from Cragside with plenty to think about, and lots of notes, primary sources and photographs. I’m looking forward to sorting through everything and to doing the filming in early August. In the meantime, here is a photo, taken on the main staircase at the end of our visit by a very patient member of staff, of Paul and myself wearing funny hats. You’re welcome.

Look out for these funny hats at Cragside!

QR codes in country houses?

QR codeOne of the original aims of this project has always been to try to provide visitors to country houses with layered interpretation, ideally linking paper resources such as trails with digital resources online, such as videos, animations and supplementary text. We originally thought QR codes placed on an electrical heritage trail might be the way to do this, with each linking to a page on our website corresponding to a different room in the house and enabling visitors to access multimedia interpretative materials. The trail would of course also contain material about each room, and would include an explanation of the content the QR code would link to.

However, something that came out of the first project steering meeting on 18 June, and which has become clearer as I have researched more people’s experiences online, is that the QR code in the heritage sector seems to be a technology which has had its day. Indeed, I think it’s fair to say you don’t see so many of them around anywhere anymore. Feedback from projects at the Brooklyn Museum, New York and the National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh has been largely negative, whereas other experiments, for example at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, the Museum of Inuit Art, Toronto and the Museum of English Rural Life, Reading have been reviewed more positively. Overall reactions have been mixed.

Nevertheless, most of the experiences I have come across relate to museums, and not to country houses. A big difference between a museum and a country house is that, when designing a museum exhibition, you are free to utilise and organise the space available however you want. Displays, cases, boards, audiovisual presentation units and the like can be arranged however is most convenient. In a country house on the other hand, the priority tends to be preserving a certain atmosphere of authenticity in the rooms, and this limits curators and educators to stick close to their source material and avoid cluttering the space with too much interpretation.

It could be a bad idea to place too much emphasis on a technology which may already be looking outdated, especially if the resources we produce are to have a long shelf life. The content, however, and the idea of connecting the physical and virtual resources, is still key; as long as the interpretative materials remain available on the website then the gateway through which we make them accessible via the printed materials can be changed. For now though, I’m not sure there exists a better alternative to QR codes – practical within the scope and budget of this project – to accomplish this. In such cases I wonder: is there still a case to be made for QR codes?