Lightning to Order

Radio Record, Volume III, Issue 54, 25 July 1930, Page 34

Lightning to Order

Britain’s. Laboratory N spite of the general depression in trade in Hngland, the electrical industry continues to make rapid and gratifying expansion. A factory has been established on the banks of the Severn in Worcestershire, with the finest electrical research laboratory in the British Empire. A new township has arisen in the space of a few months in which hundreds of miners from the distressed

areas have found employment and comfortable homes. The new industry is for the manufacture of electrical porcelain and steatite insulators, hitherto imported from Germany and America. It was demonstrated to a visitor. who was shown over the premises, that thunder and lightning could be made to order. The laboratory is a high rectangular building of concrete, and the transformers, insulators, copper Sphere, condenser banks, and other electrical apparatus inside, gives one the impression of being in a gymnasium for giants. There is a rail to prevent visitors from touching the "parallel bars," gargantuan copper, "dumb bells," and strings of hanging insulators; for death stalks the floor at the bidding of a switch. THE doors were closed and the lights turned off for the observation of the coronas and other’ discharges. Sparks began to flicker, says the onlooker, there was a staccato tapping as though a hundred typewriters were at work, and blue devil flames leaped about the room. Four- hundred thousand volts of electricity. The blue lights flickered into the intensity of sheet lightning. Bight hundred thousand volts, and forked lightning played around the laboratory. The crackling swelled to a howling crescendo, and terminated in a giant thunderclap. One million eight hundred thousand volts, and the insulators passed the test. Then there was silence, and the lights were turned on again. ° Until the establishment of this factory, the British Empire had no adequate research plants for work on high voltages. Once again, Britain has been a long time doing it, but has done it characteristically well.