Charles Algernon Parsons

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Sir Charles Algernon Parsons (1854-1931) was a British engineer who perfected the steam turbine that bears his name.

Charles Parsons was born on June 13, 1854, in London. His father, William Parsons, 3d Earl of Rosse, was a distinguished astronomer and sometime president of the Royal Society. Charles and his brothers were tutored by eminent scholars working in his father's observatory at Birr Castle, Parsonstown (now called Birr), in King's County, Ireland (Offalay, Eire). He attended Trinity College, Dublin (1871-1873), and Cambridge University (1873-1877), where he distinguished himself in mathematics. He then worked at the Armstrong engineering works located at Newcastle-upon-Tyne (1877-1881).

In 1884 Parsons joined a Gateshead partnership and entered the new field of electrical engineering. The production of cheap electricity in quantity demanded prime movers with outputs and efficiencies high above those of reciprocating engines. Thus Parsons developed the steam turbine, a machine with a long conceptual but no practical history. Stream freely expanding from high to low pressures acquires velocity and may form a jet which can impinge on a turbine wheel and yield useful work. But to get the most out of a high-pressure jet, a singlestage turbine would have to rotate at speeds above the capacities of materials then available. By setting a series of turbine wheels on one shaft and limiting the pressure drop between adjacent wheels, Parsons was able to reduce shaft and peripheral speeds to acceptable limits. By allowing steam to expand across the turbine blades, he was able to improve performance further; and by introducing the steam between a pair of coupled but opposed turbine sets, he avoided thrusts on the end bearings. He patented these and other innovations in 1884.

Electric generators then worked at about 1, 500 revolutions per minute (rpm), while Parsons' turbine worked at 18, 000 rpm. Undaunted, he designed and built a generator suitable for direct coupling. Thus, the turboalternator was born, and by 1889 several hundred were in use, mostly for ship lighting. That year Parsons set up his own works in Newcastle, concentrating at first on large turboalternators for urban electricity supplies.

In 1894 Parsons turned to the marine applications of the steam turbine and built the Turbinia, 100 feet long and displacing 44 tons. After many experiments with screw designs, it reached speeds of 34 knots in 1897. Despite initial apathy, the turbine became standard in British warships from 1905. For fast liners the turbine soon proved its economy; and with Parsons' development of suitable gear trains, the reciprocating engine was displaced from many slower ships. He was knighted in 1911, and he died on Feb. 11, 1931, in Kingston, Jamaica.

Further Reading

A biography of Parsons is Rollo Appleyard, Charles Parsons: His Life and Work (1933). A booklet by Robert Hodson Parsons, The Steam Turbine and Other Inventions of Sir Charles Parsons (1942; rev. ed. 1946), is useful. The historical scene and background are set out in Henry Winram Dickinson, A Short History of the Steam Engine (1938; 2d ed. 1963).

Parsons, Sir Charles (1854-1931). Engineer. A son of the 3rd earl of Rosse [I], Parsons grew up at Birr castle in Ireland before going to Trinity College, Dublin, and St John's College, Cambridge. His father was a distinguished chemist and astronomer and Parsons's education was scientific. After Cambridge, he took an apprenticeship at the Elswick works in Newcastle of Sir William Armstrong, of whom he spoke later with great admiration. He began working on electricity supply and by 1884 had constructed a turbo-dynamo. In 1889 he founded Parsons of Heaton on the Tyne and a power station at Newcastle was operating by turbo-generation by 1890. Parsons then applied turbines to ships, building the Turbinia, by far the fastest vessel afloat.

Charles Algernon Parsons
Charles Algernon Parsons (1854 - 1931)
Born	13 June 1854 London, England, United Kingdom
Died	11 February 1931 Cambridge, England, United Kingdom
Nationality	British
Ethnicity	British
Fields	Engineering
Institutions	Heaton, Newcastle
Alma mater	Trinity College, Dublin St. John's College, Cambridge
Known for	Steam Turbine

Sir Charles Algernon Parsons, OM (13 June 1854 – 11 February 1931) was a British engineer, best known for his invention of the steam turbine.^[1] He worked as an engineer on dynamo and turbine design, and power generation, with great influence on the naval and electrical engineering fields. He also developed optical equipment, for searchlights and telescopes.

Biography

Born in London, Parsons was the youngest son of the famous astronomer William Parsons, 3rd Earl of Rosse. He attended Trinity College, Dublin and St. John's College, Cambridge, graduating from the latter in 1877 with a first-class honours degree in mathematics.^[2] He then joined the Newcastle-based engineering firm of W.G. Armstrong as an apprentice, an unusual step for the son of an earl; then moved to Kitsons in Yorkshire where he worked on rocket powered torpedoes; and then in 1884 moved to Clarke, Chapman and Co., ship engine manufacturers near Newcastle, where he was head of their electrical equipment development. He developed a turbine engine there in 1884 and immediately utilized the new engine to drive an electrical generator, which he also designed. Parson's steam turbine, making cheap and plentiful electricity possible and revolutionising marine transport and naval warfare, the world would never be the same again.^[3]

First compound Steam Turbine, built by Parsons in 1887

The best steam turbine at the time, invented by Gustaf de Laval was an impulse design that subjected the mechanism to huge centrifugal forces and so had limited output due to the weakness of the materials available. Parsons explained that his appreciation of the scaling issue led to his 1884 breakthrough on compound steam turbine in his 1911 Rede Lecture:

"It seemed to me that moderate surface velocities and speeds of rotation were essential if the turbine motor was to receive general acceptance as a prime mover. I therefore decided to split up the fall in pressure of the steam into small fractional expansions over a large number of turbines in series, so that the velocity of the steam nowhere should be great...I was also anxious to avoid the well-known cutting action on metal of steam at high velocity."^[4]

Parson's first 1MW turbogenerator built for Elberfeld, Germany in 1899. It produced single phase electricity at 4kV.

In 1889, he founded C. A. Parsons and Company in Newcastle to produce turbo-generators to his design.^[5] In the same year he set up the Newcastle and District Electric Lighting Company. In 1894 he regained certain patent rights from Clarke Chapman. Although his first turbine was only 1.6% efficient and generated a mere 7.5 kilowatts, rapid incremental improvements in a few years led to his first megawatt turbine built in 1899 for a generating plant at Elberfeld, Germany.^[4]

Parsons was also interested in marine applications and founded the Parsons Marine Steam Turbine Company in Newcastle. Famously, in June 1897, his turbine-powered yacht, Turbinia, was exhibited moving at speed at Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee Fleet Review off Portsmouth, to demonstrate the great potential of the new technology. The Turbinia moved at 34 knots. The fastest Royal Navy ships using other technologies reached 27 knots. Part of the speed improvement was attributable to the slender hull of the Turbinia^[6].

Dreadnought. In 1906, it was the first modern battleship and was fastest in the world due to Parsons steam turbines.

Within two years, the destroyers HMS Viper and Cobra were launched equipped with Parsons turbines, followed by the first turbine powered passenger ship, the Clyde steamer TS King Edward in 1901, and the first turbine powered battleship, HMS Dreadnought in 1906^[5]. Today, Turbinia is housed in a purpose-built gallery at the Discovery Museum, Newcastle.

Parsons received the Rumford Medal of the Royal Society in 1902, was knighted in 1911 and made a member of the Order of Merit in 1927.

The Parsons turbine company survives in the Heaton area of Newcastle and is now part of Siemens, a German conglomerate. Sometimes referred to as Siemens Parsons, the company recently completed a major redevelopment programme, reducing the size of its site by around three quarters and installing the latest manufacturing technology. In 1925 Charles Parsons acquired the Grubb Telescope Company and renamed it Grubb Parsons. That company survived in the Newcastle area until 1985.

Parsons' ancestral home at Birr Castle in Ireland houses a museum detailing the contribution the Parsons family have made to the fields of science and engineering, with part of the museum given over to marine engineering work of Charles Parsons.

References

1. ^ http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/444719/Sir-Charles-Algernon-Parsons
2. ^ Parsons, the Hon. Charles Algernon in Venn, J. & J. A., Alumni Cantabrigienses, Cambridge University Press, 10 vols, 1922–1958.
3. ^ http://www.universityscience.ie/pages/scientists/sci_charles_parsons.php
4. ^ ^{a b} Vaclav Smil (2005). Creating the Twentieth Century: Technical Innovations of 1867-1914 and Their Lasting Impact. Oxford University Press. p. 62. ISBN 0195168747. http://books.google.com/books?id=w3Mh7qQRM-IC&pg=PA71&lpg=PA71&dq=Transformer+coltman+1988&source=web&ots=HRCepEDdjx&sig=2CZhFO4lxncVYZXQ0SIWMJg5qug&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=1&ct=result#PPA64,M1. Retrieved 2009-01-03. 
5. ^ ^{a b} Chronology of Charles Parsons, Birr Castle Scientific and Heritage Foundation, http://www.birrcastle.com/inventionsAndExperiments.asp, retrieved 2009-01-03 
6. ^ Charles Algernon Parsons, University of Cambridge Department of Engineering, http://www-g.eng.cam.ac.uk/125/noflash/1875-1900/parsons2.html, retrieved 2009-01-03 

See also

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Charles Algernon Parsons

• C. A. Parsons and Company
• Parsons Marine Steam Turbine Company
• Turbinia

Published Works Online

• E-book: "The Steam Turbine and Other Inventions of Sir Charles Parsons"
• Synthetic HPHT Diamond by Sir Charles Parsons

External links

• Chronology of Charles Parsons Life
• Profile at Cambridge University
• Parsons and Turbinia
• Sir Charles Parsons Symposium, excerpts from Transactions of the Newcomen Society

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