Revolution is not what you expect from the National Trust. Yet Cragside, so the Trust's guide announces, is a "revolutionary home." Set in a thousand acres of Northumberland pine forest, surrounded by charming lakes and tumbling waterfalls, it is hard at first to see what is so revolutionary about the place. The house is a vast, late-Victorian pile of towers, crenellations, gatehouses and mullion windows, exactly as old as the Trust itself. But this was the home of cutting-edge technology in the final decades of the 19th century. The house's owner, William Armstrong, was the master of Tyneside military engineering and hi-tech machinery. He made his country seat a shop window for new-fangled schemes in light, power and hydraulic apparatus. Cragside was the first house in the world lit by hydroelectricity.
I was at Cragside last spring with a television crew to make a three-part series for BBC4, called Light Fantastic, on the history and science of light. We wanted to film Cragside's scientific magic precisely because of the surreal juxtaposition there of pastoral kitsch and advanced technolo
What happened at Cragside was part of a global revolution, which between 1870 and 1895 quickly produced worldwide telecommunication systems, power and light industries and motorised transportation. If ever there was a culture of disorienting future shock, this was it. But the commodities of that revolution have become antiques, images of their inventors lying faded in sepia-tinged albums. The meanings of their machines have become banal or else vanished. Getting back to the origins of those light systems is a good way of recovering some of these meanings.
This recovery might also help to correct persistently wrong-headed grumbles about "two cultures" - philistine scientists ranged against innumerate literati. The Cragside story matters, too, because science's publicists often insist on the distance that their dead heroes maintained from technology. It is as though a gulf between pure inquiry and the milieux of market and factory was and is the precondition of scientific virtue and progress. Armstrong's revolutionary home stands for a different history. Its owner - arms manufacturer, hydraulic engineer and fly fisherman - turned his sylvan retreat into a centre of industrial and commercial innovation. Along its splendid oak staircases, the electric lights, now 125 years old, were designed to look like gas lamps, which had been designed to look like candles, which had been designed to look like heraldic lions. A Victorian guidebook captured the point: "Cragside has been described as a romance in stone and mortar," but "above and beyond the romance of colour and form, there is the romance of science, of hard struggle with nature, of power and determination."
So electric light's late-19th century revolution illustrates the entanglement of science, technology and commerce. And Cragside's Armstrong gives the light revolution a human face. It wasn't always an attractive one. Peddling huge guns to the rulers of Persia, Japan and Afghanistan, battling striking workers in the Tyneside factories and celebrating the technologies he developed in his forest fastness, Armstrong was not necessarily on the side of peace and social progress. But his enterprise neatly embodied what counted in that dynamic programme of social engineering and high theory. Modern memory leaps too fast from steam to silicon, from King Cotton's mills and King Coal's smokestacks to the virtual realities of the information age. In between, there was a spectacular epoch of networked light and power systems which helped to make the world modern.
Two brief moments in the later 19th century are especially salient in this power and light revolution. Between summer 1876 and early 1879, enthusiastic pundits amazed their audiences with news of the telephone, the phonograph, improved cathode rays and the electric lightbulb. In the US, Thomas Alva Edison became an international celebrity known as the "wizard of Menlo Park" - the Menlo Park lab was the Silicon Valley of its day. Newspaper stories, public exhibitions and commercial promotions touted his devices worldwide. Then between mid-1895 and late 1899, another media explosion accompanied shows of cinematography, X-rays, radioactive energy, wireless telegraphy, and the laboratory identification of charged particles much tinier than atoms known as electrons. Men like Armstrong and his allies were key players in this drama.
Recent works have evoked the mood. Victoria Glendinning's novel Electricity and Stephen Poliakoff's film Century are both devoted to the physical and moral electrification of fin-de-siècle society. But more commonly, we think of country house parties and wittily elegant salons. Alnwick Castle, seat of the Duke of Northumberland, is now celebrated in movieland as the home of Hogwarts' youthfully olde worlde magicians. Yet the castle was one of the first to use Armstrong's hydraulic machines to run its kitchens, and in 1881 Armstrong and his allies used the ducal seat to stage a display of up-to-date electric lighting. The two worlds were intimately linked. The revolution had its bards, such as Jules Verne, whose Phileas Fogg travelled the world in 1872, and HG Wells, whose Time Traveller set out in 1895. It has its monuments in revolutionary homes and riverside power stations, country house laboratories and physics institutes. And because it has something important to teach us about the relation between engineering, science and commerce, it deserves a more central place in our political imagination.
One of the most significant lessons Cragside's science teaches is the importance of networking. The power and light system relied on making networks at every level, on every scale. Every local light system needed a technical network, its advance needed widespread commercial and scientific networks, and the global spread of the power and light systems required comparably planetary networks of engineering and knowledge. The trick was to make what worked in one place work anywhere. This enterprise, in turn, required the accumulation in special places, such as power stations, labs, cable offices and classrooms, of resources otherwise widely and chaotically distributed. These processes of networking and accumulation governed the politics and geography of the light and power revolution. Individual components of the network might be the result of relatively solitary invention and discovery, but the whole power and light network was collective and collaborative, a genuine achievement of public engineering.
The networks started small. Armstrong and his colleagues had to design elegant wiring layouts to carry current around the light network in the house. The layouts were integrated neatly into the milieu of John Everett Millais and Lord Leighton, whose canvases adorned the walls. The integrity of the Cragside system relied, in turn, on the integrity of the personal and technical connections that Armstrong established with other Tyneside scientists and entrepreneurs. His friend Joseph Swan was a Sunderland chemist who moved to Newcastle in 1846 to work on the behaviour of carbon in developing better photographic images. The carbon business boomed. Swan and Armstrong turned their attention from photographs to lights.
For several decades, the only challenger to Victorian gas light had been noisy and unreliable arc lamps, which glowed brightly when high current electricity discharged in the space between two electrodes. Swan designed a different way of getting reliable bright light. Carbon was Swan's way, because it glows but doesn't easily melt when electric current flows through it. Both Swan and his great rival Edison worked out that if the filament of an incandescent lamp had high electrical resistance, it would be economically efficient and the current supplying the lamps could be kept low. Low currents meant minimal heat losses on the long supply lines that they had started to envisage supplying power and light worldwide. Swan managed to design an artificial form of cellulose which carbonised perfectly. "I think the Almighty made carbon especially for the electric light," Edison once told reporters. But carbon would oxidise in air, and its glow would stop. So a carbon filament incandescent bulb needed to have all the gas sucked out from a secure glass container, and that needed high quality vacuum pumps. And as long as the electric current was supplied by low efficiency batteries, electric light systems would stay local. Only a few could possibly afford the hydroelectric system Armstrong commanded at Cragside. New networks had to be forged to make the power and light system shine.
Newcastle provided crucial resources, economic, scientific and personal, for the new systems. One of Armstrong's former apprentices was Charles Parsons, member of an eminent Anglo-Irish clan devoted to big engineering projects. In the 1880s, Parsons helped to launch a Tyneside firm to build new-style steam turbines to drive dynamos for the electric lights. Reliable high-power and long-range electric light systems now seemed viable. The first power stations in the world to use these fine turbo-generators opened in Newcastle in 1890; a station in Cambridge followed two years later. At the same time, the emigré chemist John Theodore Merz started a local Newcastle electricity supply company, while his son Charles began to work out how to use innovative science and generating systems to design Britain's first effective regional power network. Merz's Tyneside power stations, completed in the decade before the first world war, became the most economical in the world. The same power technologies were soon applied to the Royal Navy's warships. Links between Armstrong, Merz, Parsons and their allies combined the science of electric power with British military, economic and imperial ambition.
These men's entrepreneurial sciences wielded systems of vacuum pumps, glass bulbs, high resistance carbon elements and powerful steam turbines in spectacular public displays. Media campaigns stimulated the consumer demand which the systems could then meet. In the US, Edison's dominance was in part a consequence of his journalistic savvy and his eye for the creation of electrical demand as well as its supply. His merger with Swan's company was crucial in securing commercial control and scientific understanding of the light system. He sent his London-born secretary, Samuel Insull, to survey the British scene. In Brighton in 1894, Insull learnt something crucial for the successful extension of the power and light network. A key problem for suppliers was that electricity demand was very unevenly loaded, with maximum use at twilight and the early evening. But Brighton consumers, so Insull learnt, were charged for electricity use in a way which accurately matched the costs to the generator. This meant the load on the power supply was much more evenly distributed, maximising generators' profits. The load factor problem drove suppliers to market more and more electrically powered devices. Homes joined factories as crucial battlefields in the electrification campaign. The refrigerator, as one historian of technology puts it, acquired its hum.
Visions of evenly and profitably distributed load across global electricity networks illuminating a newly, indeed spiritually, transformed world became the stock of fin-de-siècle political discourse. There are analogies with the late-20th century internet reveries of electronic ruralism in charmingly self-sustaining cyber-villages. Nor were these visions the prerogative of revolutionaries, then or now. Indeed, one enthusiast was the Tory prime minister, Lord Salisbury. Like his friend Armstrong a long-term experimenter in optics and chemistry, Salisbury turned his family seat at Hatfield into another advanced outpost of electric light and applied science. In a converted dressing room he made himself an adept in vacuum pump technology and arc lighting. He visited Armstrong's Tyneside works in 1880, saw the new Swan system, and by the following year had a domestic lighting network to match that of Cragside. The system was initially erratic. On one occasion, a Hatfield house party had to extinguish an electric fire with a barrage of cushions. By 1883, however, the house had become a showplace for the possibilities of domestic electrical power, and Salisbury was planning the electrification of the estate's farms.
This was no mere whim of an eccentric hobbyist. The prime minister took the political economy of light and electrification very seriously. In a portentous speech at the inaugural meeting of the Institution of Electrical Engineers in 1889, he proclaimed a new historical epoch ushered in by lightbulbs and telegraphs. The steam age was waning. It had demanded huge local concentrations of work and workers, an "unnatural and often unwholesome aggregation." Electrification would reverse the process. "If ever it shall happen that in the house of the artisan you can turn on power as you now can turn on gas, you will then see men and women able to pursue in their own houses many industries which now require the aggregation of the factory." Salisbury's government had passed legislation in order to stimulate private investment in the power and light industry. Now he told the ambitious electrical engineers that their systems would halt urbanisation, undermine the factory system and restore "the integrity of the family upon which rests the moral hopes of our race." The science and technology of electric light and power would replace the dangerously alienated urban proletariat with a restored and luminous world of electric pastoralism.
The master scientists of the age saw an intimate relationship between the concerns of the mathematician's study, the physicist's laboratory and the factories and testing rooms of the global electrical networks. They were right. Their leader, the prodigious Glasgow professor William Thomson, created Lord Kelvin by Salisbury's government, repeatedly stressed "how much science, even in its most lofty speculations, gains in return for benefits conferred by its application to promote the social and material welfare of man."
Kelvin was simultaneously a financially astute manager of telegraphy and power concerns, an experimental physicist and an expert mathematical theorist of the energetics of light, heat and electricity. A science exhibition at Glasgow University, opened this autumn, is entitled "Kelvin: Revolutionary Scientist." But it is his close friend James Clerk Maxwell, the physicists' physicist, whom modern science considers the principal theoretician of the electrical world. That appealing scientific myth which separates theory from practice, and then simplistically derives technological success from prior scientific understanding, has made it hard to see Maxwell in the context of the engineering world of his time.
The October 2004 issue of Physics World illuminates the point with two contrasting comments on Kelvin and Maxwell. The reviewer of a new biography of Kelvin reminds physicists that none of them even mentioned him in a survey to find the greatest physicist of all time. Then the reviewer outlines Kelvin's brilliant commercial and engineering activities, his profitable electromagnetic inventions, and his fundamental role in the success of worldwide telegraph networks. In stark contrast, Maxwell tops a new poll among physicists as author of the greatest equations in history. Maxwell's equations are worn on T-shirts, they set forth a vision of the fundamental forces of nature, and they put electromagnetism and optics "on a solid theoretical basis for the first time." What is missing from the commonplace picture of the sadly mundane Kelvin then, is any account of how closely related were his engineering and his science. And the same is true of the seemingly purist Maxwell.
The emergence of Maxwell's equations in their familiar form illustrates how the new technical networks of Victorian Britain mattered to its sciences. The puzzles of light, electricity and magnetism started with long distance underwater telegraphy, the nervous system of the empire. One MP told the Royal Colonial Institute that there was no reason to fear that the empire would "break up and dissolve like its predecessors." He insisted that "the two or three slender wires that connect the scattered parts of her realm" were of more use than the military, the administration, or "the unswerving justice of Queen Victoria's rule." The new British physics laboratories, managed by Maxwell, Kelvin and their colleagues, were part of this imperial communications project.
But submarine telegraph signals were often unreadable. When a cable broke down, it was hard to find the fault in the middle of the Atlantic or the Persian Gulf. Telegraph companies' income was endangered. Kelvin and Maxwell joined committees tasked with fixing the problem. They designed new techniques for electrical and magnetic measurements. They completely changed the model of electromagnetic signalling, and in the process engineered a new story about the nature of light.
Maxwell summarised what physicists knew about such processes. Electric charges affected each other across space with a uniform force. Wire loops carrying electric currents behaved like magnets, affecting each other according to their orientation. Move a magnet near a wire, and a current would start to flow in the wire. Pass a current near a magnet, and the magnet would kick. Maxwell designed a series of equations to describe these facts. They showed the best way to think about the transmission of electrical action was not as a fluid flowing along a channel, but as the alternating movement of energy between different states in a field which filled all space.
The model solved all the problems of telegraph signalling. And it had a big implication. The speed at which disturbance would travel through this field, the equations showed, was just that of light itself. So light was a wave travelling in the same medium that was responsible for electromagnetism. It is scarcely surprising that one French scientist, reading these Maxwellian models of how light travels and electromagnetism behaves, remarked that "we thought we were entering the tranquil and neatly ordered abode of reason, but we find ourselves in a factory."
In Maxwell's factory, there was amusement as well as application. In 1872-73, when preparing his masterly Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism for the press, he was avidly waiting for his copy of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and joking with friends that George Eliot's Middlemarch should be read as an allegory about the life and death of the sun. He also composed a preface to his new book in which he observed: "The important applications of electromagnetism to telegraphy have also reacted on pure science by giving a commercial value to accurate electrical measurements." Telegraphy meant electrical experiments could be conducted on a global scale.
When he reviewed a handbook for telegraph engineers in spring 1873, Maxwell insisted on "the notion of electricity as a measurable commodity." Kelvin chimed in: "When electric light becomes commercial" then electricity would become something you could manipulate, buy, sell and measure. And indeed, it is in the commercial milieux of telegraphy and electric lighting, and not in Maxwell's Treatise itself, that we find the familiar version of his great equations. They first saw the light in a series of articles written in the mid-1880s, years after Maxwell's death, by one of his greatest disciples, a poverty-stricken telegraph engineer named Oliver Heaviside. Heaviside worked in Newcastle on a submarine cable laid under the North sea, then started sending articles to the electrical engineers' magazine, The Electrician. He completely recast Maxwell's complex formalism, showing how to derive the signal properties more easily and underlining how energy was transmitted through space. It was in this form that Maxwell's equations became the indispensable key to the world of light and electromagnetism.
The same year, the Canadian-American experimenter Alexander Graham Bell reflected that "the discoveries upon which many of the most important scientific investigations of the day rest will be searched for in vain in scientific literature. The telegraph, the telephone and the electric light are inventions which illustrate the fact." Bell knew what he was talking about. He had his own version of Cragside on a lake in Nova Scotia, where he used the profits from the telephone system to test powered flight and optical telegraphy. He well understood that telegraph stations and light works were among the most advanced sites of modern physics and engineering.
So the new technologies were not effortlessly derived from prior abstract theories. The story is more complex and rewarding. There was always a feedback between technique, science and the markets. Take the new-fangled and highly profitable vacuum pumps demanded by the electric light industry. Only when powerful pumps came on stream could Swan, Edison and their collaborators start making and distributing viable lightbulbs.
"The improvement in recent years in the production of high vacua is an example of the advantages which accrue to the study of any branch of science when it has industrial applications." So wrote the Manchester engineer and mathematician JJ Thomson, one of Maxwell's successors as professor of experimental physics at Cambridge. Thomson understood better than anyone how the lighting industry had completely transformed the manufacture of empty space. It was this transformation which spawned his most important experimental breakthrough and won him somewhat regretful repute as the discoverer of the electron.
In 1879-80, just as electric lightbulbs were first put on show in Europe and North America, London scientists were entertained by the astonishing lights produced when electric currents were sent through such almost empty glass bulbs. Put a negatively charged electric plate inside the bulb, then lower the pressure with one of the new vacuum pumps: so-called "cathode rays" seemed to stream from the plate and produce uncanny fluorescence on the surface of the glass. When he took over the Cambridge lab, Thomson investigated these potentially useful rays. The lab relied on its supplies of hardware and skilled personnel from the electric light industry.
What were these strange rays? A magnet would deflect them, and Thomson, a loyal Maxwellian, reckoned this meant that they must be made of particles. Then there ought to be an electrical deflection too. But the best German labs could not get any response when they tried to shift the rays with strong electric forces. That suggested the rays were not particles but must instead be a kind of wavelike current flowing through space. Thomson was not convinced. He guessed that the Germans could not see electric deflection because there was too much gas left in their bulbs.
Thomson worked out how to get a much better void. To his delight the electric deflection became quite marked. It also meant his Cambridge team could balance the effects of electricity and magnetism on the rays, so measure the ratio between the particles' mass and their electric charge. Assume each particle's charge was the same as that carried by a hydrogen atom. Then, amazingly, the mass of each particle was less than one thousandth of an atom. The first subatomic particle had been identified.
Thomson long avoided baptising this particle an "electron." Some of his contemporaries thought his experiments were an elaborate joke. They could scarcely imagine that there was something smaller than an atom visible in a dandified Cambridge lightbulb. Thomson himself well knew that "the delicate instruments used in physical laboratories may give one result one day and a contradictory one the next. They illustrate the truth of the saying that the law of the constancy of Nature was never learned in a physical laboratory." What was it, then, that helped give such revolutionary claims their authority? The gradual transformation of the laboratory and the workshop, the appearance of new radiations and electrical behaviours ineluctably shifted both lay and scientific senses of what was plausible.
There is a traditional distinction between enterprises which want to understand things as they are, and those which try to make new ones. Most modern science does both, simultaneously. So in an optics lab or at a place like Cragside, it is hard to tell quite what is natural, what artificial. The challenge for a self-respecting television crew gazing down on Armstrong's revolutionary home was to show how closely connected were the picturesque and the technological in this story of light and profit. The revolution of which this remarkable house was part was all about engineering the universe. The furniture of the world was changed to reveal what it was made of and to direct it anew along profitable paths. Evacuated glass bulbs became heraldic light fittings, cathode ray tubes, the origin of modern electronics. These transformations are not best understood as marks of virtuous seclusion and arrogant purity, but of scientists' vital and continuing mundane presence in the revolution that made modernity.
