First northern power house
QUESTION Where was the world’s first hydroelectric power scheme?
REMARKABLY, the world’s first hydroelectric project was developed in a country house in Northumberland.
William George armstrong, 1st baron armstrong, was an engineer and industrialist who founded the armstrong Whitworth manufacturing company on Tyneside.
It built armaments, ships, locomotives and later vehicles and aircraft.
Together with the celebrated Victorian architect Richard Norman Shaw, armstrong built Cragside, a Tudor revival country manor just outside Rothbury.
armstrong equipped the house with the most uptodate technology including a waterpowered laundry, an early version of a dishwasher, hydraulic lift, hydroelectric rotisserie, Turkish bath and dumb waiter.
To power these devices, armstrong dammed a number of streams to create five lakes and installed a hydraulic engine that drove the machines in his house.
In 1870, he connected a Siemens dynamo, creating the world’s first domestic hydroelectric plant. electricity from this plant was used to power Cragside and the estate’s farm buildings. In 1878, he used it to power an arc light.
The original plant was abandoned more than 50 years ago. However, in 2020, a 50 ft archimedes screw was installed below one of the five lakes to power the manor’s 350 light bulbs.
The world’s first commercial hydroelectric power scheme was built on Fox River in appleton, Wisconsin, by paper manufacturer H. J. Rogers.
It was later named the appleton edison light Company.
When the appleton plant began operations on September 30, 1882, it produced enough electricity to light Rogers’s home, the plant and a nearby building. It was gradually extended to power a number of buildings in the town.
Over the next decade, more than 200 hydroelectric power plants were built in the U.S.
Steven Robertson, Stoke-on-Trent, Staffs.
QUESTION On December 31, 1900, the Daily Mail published a series of prophecies that ‘may be accomplished before 2001’. Did they come true?
ON New year’s eve 1900, the Daily mail published a souvenir edition printed in goldcoloured ink, dubbed The Golden edition. The editorial made several predictions for the coming century, which was correctly counted as starting on January 1, 1901.
It correctly suggested that the 60mph average for steam train travel would be broken and electricity would be used to power the railways.
However, the author incorrectly argued that the 20thcentury answer to the problem would be the monorail:
‘There is now in serious contemplation the construction of a railway between manchester and liverpool, which shall have trains running upon but a single line in the centre, relying for their balance upon the principle of centrifugal force, with certain safeguards.’
The article discussed the limitations of steamship travel in regard to crossing the atlantic and suggested a possible submarine service.
It correctly predicted the Channel Tunnel: ‘even now the difficulties in the way of its construction are regarded rather as political than practical.
‘It is considered that the geology of the straits presents no obstacles, and the depth along the proposed line of route nowhere exceeds 180ft, little more than half the height of St Paul’s Cathedral.’
Regarding air travel, it stated: ‘So much study is being given to the question of aerial navigation and recent experiments have been of such a character as to convince the most sceptical that in the course of time journeys to particular places may be accomplished in this way. all this tends to an enormous shrinkage of our country, our empire and the world.’
mobile phones were predicted: ‘Wireless telegraphy when perfected and generally adopted, as mr marconi believes it eventually will be, will make the shrinkage greater. Wireless telephony would appear to be the natural corollary.’
another prediction was: ‘The North Pole will inevitably give up its secret [though] the South Pole may or may not escape.’
Great medical advances were anticipated, including a dramatic increase in age and a cure for cancer.
However, a host of developments are conspicuously missing, including space travel, personal computers, the ascendancy of the car and the nuclear bomb.
Michael Bainbridge, Saltash, Cornwall.
QUESTION What is the considered to be the oldest landscape painting?
THE archaeological museum in Dolni Vestonice, Czech Republic, has an engraved mammoth tusk known as the Pavlov map, which is thought to depict a river, valleys, hills and pathways. about 27,000 years old, it probably assisted hunters in their search for animals.
Since it served a purpose and made no use of paint, art historians decided that the oldest landscape painting was, in fact, a mural discovered in 1963 in Catalhoyuk, Turkey.
at the site of an extensive Stone age town, archaeologist James mellaart found that many of the 150 boxshaped rooms and houses were decorated with murals, plaster reliefs and sculptures.
One mural appears to show a view of people’s homes and the eruption of the nearby twinconed Hasan Dag volcano 8,600 years ago. This was regarded as the first painted landscape representation created purely for art’s sake.
However, it was superseded by the discovery in 1994 of the wall art in the Chauvet cave in the ardeche, France. These paintings date back 36,000 years, long before the last Ice age.
One drawing depicts a black volcano spewing out white ash, with an animal later superimposed on the landscape.
Ian MacDonald, Billericay, Essex.
IS THERE a question to which you want to know the answer? Or do you know the answer to a question here? Write to: Charles Legge, Answers To Correspondents, Daily Mail, 2 Derry Street, London W8 5TT; or email charles.legge@dailymail.co.uk. A selection is published, but we’re unable to enter into individual correspondence.