Charles Parsons gatecrashed Queen Victoria's naval review in a turbine-powered speedboat
In June 1897, with admirals and a prince looking on, an uninvited little vessel called Turbinia tore through the fleet at 34 knots, faster than anything the Royal Navy owned. Its builder, an earl's son turned engineering apprentice, had invented the modern steam turbine, and within a decade battleships and liners ran on his design.
Parsons was born in London on 13 June 1854. His father, the 3rd Earl of Rosse, was the astronomer William Parsons, and the family seat was Birr Castle in County Offaly. Home tutors who also assisted the Earl's astronomy taught him science, and he went on to read mathematics at Trinity College Dublin and St John's College, Cambridge, graduating with first-class honours in 1877. Then he did something unusual for an aristocrat: he became an apprentice at W. G. Armstrong's works in Newcastle.
In 1884, while running electrical development at Clarke, Chapman and Co., he built a turbine spinning at 18,000 revolutions a minute and hooked it to a generator of his own design. His key insight, explained in his 1911 Rede Lecture, was to let the steam's pressure drop in many small stages across a row of turbines, keeping speeds moderate and sparing the metal from high-velocity steam. A rival impulse turbine by Gustaf de Laval was limited by the enormous centrifugal forces it created. Parsons's first machine was only 1.6 percent efficient and produced 7.5 kilowatts, yet by 1899 he had built a megawatt unit for a plant at Elberfeld in Germany. In 1890 his lighting company opened Forth Banks, the first power station to generate electricity with turbo generators.
Turbinia's stunt at the Diamond Jubilee review at Spithead on 26 June 1897 worked. The destroyers Viper and Cobra followed within two years, then the Clyde steamer King Edward in 1901, the first turbine passenger ship, and in 1906 HMS Dreadnought, the first turbine battleship. Turbinia now sits in Newcastle's Discovery Museum.
Honours piled up: a knighthood in 1911, the Order of Merit in 1927, the Copley Medal in 1928. He also bought the Grubb telescope firm, and designed the Auxetophone, an early compressed-air gramophone. His wife Katharine and daughter Rachel co-founded the Women's Engineering Society in 1919. Parsons died aboard the Duchess of Richmond on 11 February 1931 during a cruise.
Source: Charles Algernon Parsons
