R.E. Crompton - pioneer of electrical engineering

 The Cromptons were a wealthy Yorkshire family with extensive estates and the young Crompton grew up knowing he was destined for career in the army or diplomatic service. It was a visit to the Great Exhibition of 1851 that gave young Crompton then aged six quite different ideas. He had travelled to London on a railway train pulled by six steam engines. To add to this were Daniel Gooch's broad gauge Lord of the Isles and Thomas Crampton's Liverpool. He had caught the steam bug and set about making his own steam road vehicle the Bluebell. As is the way with invention, this first iteration failed.

Crompton was gazetted as an ensign in the 3rd Battalion of the Rifle Brigade was was sent out to India. Steam followed him for he saw how painfully slow transport was in India, but also how good the roads were. The answer was a vehicle called the Primer with rubber tyres. This simply did not have the power and, if it did, the tyres slipped. So back to the drawing board and Ransome, Sims and Head of Orwell Works in Ipswich. The result was the Chenab pulling an omnibus capable of seating 130 people. In the event the payload was Crompton's new wife and an entourage to provide for the every need of the Chenab. The journey was astonishing for the time, being all the way to Wolverhampton. Apart from the length of the journey, it became known for the first recorded instance of car sickness.

As I write in my blog on Chelmsford, it was this East Anglian town that brought Crompton to electricity for which he is best known. The route, though, was circuitous. Two cousin had bough the Stanton Ironworks in the Erewash Valley and were keen to begin production of iron pipes. They engaged R.E. Crompton to manage the project to bring the works into use. The timescale was such that 24 hour working was required and this needed lighting. Crompton had heard of the work of the French Gamme with rudimentary dynamo and arc lamp. This proved effective and Crompton went on to develop it as I tell in the blog.

So much of invention seems to be about collaboration. Crompton was contacted by Joseph Swan of Newcastle and he visited to be met with a bright display of incandescent comprising a filament suspended in a vacuum within a glass globe. The two men went on to collaborate on lighting installations in a number of great houses. An interesting aside was the birth of the trade of wiring contractors said to have taking up the slack from bell hangers. Another collaboration was with the Swiss engineer Sulzer, whose name also appears when British Railways moved away from steam to diesel electric. With Crompton it was in the context of power transmission where Sulzer had used some of Crompton's dynamos to generate electricity to power electric motors.

Crompton secured his first large scale contract in Vienna which had suffered dreadful fires in its opera house and theatres from defective gas lighting. Electricity was the answer and Crompton installed Crompton-Willans generating sets to provide DC power at 400 volts taken down to 100 volts for the swan incandescent bulbs. From this success he provided power for the new Kensington Court Estate, again using DC. At this time, as I wrote in my blog on Edison, AC was becoming increasingly used including by Ferranti at Deptford. Nonetheless for lighting DC remained more reliable to a few decades to come.

A home laboratory is clearly what everyone needs and Crompton one at his Kensington home where he would explore electricity alongside Faraday and Kelvin.

Crompton was not one to be confined to particular areas of engineering. He was a keen cyclist and turned his attention to the improvement of road surfaces.

In his final years he advocated a national electricity grid to allow the population to spread out across the country reducing overcrowding in industrial areas. Surely we can see the need for this now with the north south divide.

Further reading:

L.T.C. Rolt, Great Engineers (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1962)