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.]

The peripatetic post-doc: conference talks and public lectures

Our panel
Our panel at ESSHC 2016, Valencia.

Last month I spent some time travelling and giving talks about our project, and was very encouraged by the positive feedback we received.  It began with a talk at the end of March in Valencia at the European Social Science History Conference, given as part of a panel on energy use in the countryside.  As a historian of science and technology I must admit that this was not a conference which would otherwise have appeared on my radar, being very general in scope, but it was for precisely this reason that it afforded Abigail Harrison-Moore and me the opportunity to reach out and engage a broader cross-section of the wider historical community with our project.

At a conference of that size you don’t expect large audiences for any one session, but we were very pleased with the level of engagement with our topic, and the thoughtful comments and discussion which followed the panel.  Although there were only a handful of historians of technology at the conference, the attendance at our session and the conversations which have come out of our meetings with other scholars have demonstrated to us the unexpectedly large degree to which other people are working on questions related to ours within their own respective historical disciplines. Although as historians I feel we tend to fracture quite easily into insular sub-groups – historians of STEM, economic historians, art historians, environmental historians… – I would certainly recommend attendance at broader conferences such as the ESSHC as a means of reaching out beyond our own disciplinary communities.

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Professor Graeme Gooday explains how electric arc lighting first came to London.

I then delivered our Cragside, Standen and Lotherton Hall public lectures.  The first of these, focusing on Cragside, was given jointly with Graeme Gooday at the Newcastle Literary and Philosophical Society, the very venue were Swan first presented his lightbulb in February 1879 – noted by one attendee in their feedback: “It was great to have this here where Swan first demonstrated.”  The turn-out was excellent – nearly 70 people – and our double-act was very effective: we shared out the material such that Professor Gooday covered the more general sweep of the narrative, and I focused in on developments at Cragside where they were key to the story.  This switching between speakers ensured we maintained a good pace, as well as the interest of the audience!

My talk at Standen gave me the opportunity to discuss our work with many of the volunteers who work in the house.  For this I used the videos filmed for the Standen section of our online interactive resource in order to structure the talk, leading the audience on a virtual tour around some of the key rooms of the house and expanding upon the themes raised in the video clips.  When asked in our feedback form how the content of the talk would affect their work in the house and their interactions with visitors, many volunteers gave very positive responses such as:

  • “Can place Standen’s illuminations in a historical setting”
  • “The visitors are fascinated that electricity was in Standen from the beginning. It will help me to give them correct information”
  • “I’ll talk much better about early electricity than I was able to do before”
  • “I have learned a lot more about electricity in the house. The visitors are always interested in the electricity”
  • “Will enable room guides to better answer visitors’ questions. Some visitors want to discuss early electricity in great detail.”
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My talk in the Drawing Room at Lotherton Hall.

For each talk, we asked attendees to tell us the most interesting thing they had learnt.  One of the most common responses to this question was the role of women in the story of the uptake of domestic electricity.  Some respondents noted the importance of women in promoting the acceptance of the new technology as something of which they had been unaware; for others it was the concerns of women regarding the brightness of electric lighting compared to softer gas, oil or candle lighting which was most interesting.

Encouragingly, one attendee at the Newcastle talk, in answer to the question “To what extent do you agree that this evening’s talk was accessible and understandable?” (strongly agree, agree, etc), responded “Strongly agree.  Definitely thought beforehand it may not be.”  So I’m glad we managed to meet and go beyond expectations there!  Another noted the “irony of sitting in the dark for an illuminating talk on lighting!”

My next and final such public lecture of the project will be at Nostell Priory, a National Trust property near Wakefield, close to Leeds, on Sunday 19 June; please check the events page for more details.

Lights, Camera, Standen! (And Cragside!)

I’ve recently been busily travelling around the country visiting Standen and Cragside with film crews to film and photograph various rooms for our digital interactive. At Standen we were joined by the very helpful Leeds Media Services, who will also be doing all our editing, and at Cragside we worked with the University’s own Digital Learning Team, and also filmed material which will be used in first year teaching in January.

Taking photos in the Drawing Room at Standen.
Taking photos in the Drawing Room at Standen.

The main body of the digital interactive will comprise three floor plans, one for each house, and within each floor plan users will be able to click on four rooms to find out more about the history of electricity in that room of the house. Clicking on a room will display a large photo of the interior of the room, within which will be a clickable hotspot, for example an electric lamp, a telephone, or an electric call signal board. Users will have to find this hotspot, and hovering over it will generate a larger picture of the object, and a question about electricity, which, when clicked on, will open a video answering the question and giving more information.

On these visits we had very little time as we needed to fit around the respective houses’ schedules, so we needed to be very efficient and well organised. We were also very aware of the potential dangers of using filming equipment in small spaces filled with so many invaluable artefacts! Nevertheless, we knew beforehand exactly what we wanted to film and photograph, and we got it all done carefully and in good time.

Not allowed on the carpet!
Not allowed on the carpet!

It was interesting to move around some of the rooms in areas which are normally roped off, and which the public can only see from a distance; in one room in Standen this necessitated us all removing our shoes, a slightly surreal experience which made me glad I had, however unwittingly, managed to find socks without holes in them that morning. We were very grateful for the hospitality of the teams at both houses, and especially for accommodating our requests to move interpretative materials, rope barriers, or occasionally some of their display objects around in order to improve the shot or the photograph.

The library at Cragside. ©University of Leeds Digital Learning Team and Leeds Media Services
The library at Cragside. ©University of Leeds Digital Learning Team and Leeds Media Services

One of my favourite shots, which I am looking forward to using in the interactive, is one in the Library at Cragside, where we simulated a power failure by filming the lights slowly going out. Early electrical installations often weren’t very reliable! We will be filming at Lotherton Hall, the third partner house, in December.

Electric Art at Cragside

I was recently contacted, via the ‘Share your Stories’ section of the website, by Irene Brown, an artist who in 2013 made an art installation for Cragside called ‘Fulmination’. The installation was part of the Building Dreams exhibition, which marked the 150th anniversary of the house, and comprised a video of Cragside projected within a large glass chemistry flask, as you can see from the picture.

Irene says:

“A dramatic thunderstorm crashes repeatedly, flashes of lightning illuminating a tempestuous landscape where Cragside House appears held, fully three dimensional within the centre of the glass sphere. The piece provokes evocative associations between powerful natural forces and Armstrong’s harnessing of the elements to create hydroelectricity. The atmosphere in the room reflects the dangerous and magical potential of early experiments with electricity.”

For more pictures of this and other similar works by Irene, please visit her website, where you can also see the video used in the ‘Fulmination’ installation.

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!

Electricity, lights, and really bad poetry: adventures in the Tyne and Wear Archives

Today I popped over to Newcastle to visit the Tyne and Wear Archives, based in the Discovery Centre museum, and spent the day perusing documents they keep which belonged to Lord and Lady Armstrong of Cragside. I was looking for several things:

  • information about the electrical equipment and systems in use at Cragside in the period;

  • opinions or responses regarding the electric lighting from visitors or guests, or from Lady (Margaret) Armstrong herself;

  • key dates for the timeline which will form a part of the digital interactive on which I am currently working (and on which more in a later post);

  • anecdotes or fun little stories about electricity in the house which might help to illustrate the video content we are producing in August.

1st LORD ARMSTRONG OF CRAGSIDE painted when he was eighty-eight by Mary Lemon Waller, 1898
Lord Armstrong, painted in 1898 by Mary Lemon Waller. ©National Trust Images/Derrick E. Witty

As with any archival research, I ended up ticking a few of these boxes, not ticking others, and finding some items which I had not expected. For starters, I found a lovely little testimonial to Lord Armstrong’s character, from a family friend by the name of Emilia de Riano, resident in Granada, Spain, who noted in a letter to him in October 1884 that he was “the dearest creature in the world”.

Information about Cragside’s electrical equipment and some relevant dates were easy enough to find, such as details of the hydroelectric dynamo and its associated batteries. One letter also noted that there was enough water power from the dynamo to produce hydroelectricity to light the house 10 months out of the year; “the remaining two months however are uncertain”. Pendant (hanging) light fittings were installed in the drawing room around July 1884, and plans were being drawn up to electrically light the stables – which had previously been lit by gas – in 1903 in order to reduce the gas bill.

What I was slightly surprised not to find was any mention of Cragside’s hydroelectricity or electric lights in correspondence from those who had recently visited and stayed in the house. Even when this would have been incredibly novel and unusual, in 1884 (a year which, due to the unfathomable expediencies of the Law of Archival Serendipity, was quite generously represented), there was nothing in any letters which otherwise praised the beauty and wonder of the property.

However, something else I found, also from 1884, might help to explain this absence. It appears that in this year Lord Armstrong was having trouble with several of the lamps in the house, and would either have not been using them, or may have sent them to the Edison Swan Company to be examined and replaced, as suggested by a rather apologetic letter from one of the company’s representatives. This provides some nice Cragside-specific support for one of the themes which Graeme Gooday brings out in Domesticating Electricity, that electric lighting was not an unproblematic technology, and early users often found the system to be quite unreliable.

Finally, I was most gratified to find, tucked away at the end of a bundle of letters, an unsigned, undated poem in praise of Cragside. It didn’t mention electricity, as it may well have pre-dated the house’s electrical installation entirely.

O Cragside most beautiful place

On the whole of this earth’s fine face…

…its beautiful apples so red

on which you’re so bountifully fed

And its beautiful fish

That look nice in a dish”

It continued:

And then upon the moor

you find the bird pool

That is the grouse

so far from the house

Then in the fields round about

you find the partridge in and out

Then we have the blackbird sweet

come in autumn as a great treat”

Perhaps it is little wonder the author preferred to remain anonymous to posterity.