Parsons' yacht Turbinia - picture courtesy of Rolls-Royce plc
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Parsons' yacht Turbinia famously gate-crashed the Spithead Review in 1897 after the inspection of the fleet by Queen Victoria. (Visit Cambridge University's website to see photos of the Turbinia, weaving in and out of the warships at speed!)
The paper entitled "The Application of the Steam Turbine to Marine Propulsion", by F E C Jarrett, sets the scene for Parsons' remarkable invention and the Turbinia trials, after which - and within a very short time - all the world's leading ships were propelled by Parsons turbine engines.
It was during 1884 that the thirty year old Charles A Parsons (sixth son of the scientifically minded third Earl of Rosse) then a junior partner with the engineering firm of Clarke Chapman & Co, filed his first turbine patent.
The provisional specification for the marine turbine was dated 8 January 1894 and was an extremely comprehensive document. The power available, the hull size necessary and the estimated speed were all co-related. The hull was to be 100ft long and the vessel was named the Turbinia with an intended speed in excess of 30 knots...After the first test run there followed a period of unbending engineering persistence; 31 full speed tests were completed and 7 different propellers were tried, the best results being obtained with three propellers on the one shaft; a disappointing top speed of 19.5 knots was obtained which meant that only about one-fifth of the design power was effective.... All this effort and considerable disappointment, together with the increasing demand for his turbo-generator, appears to have been accepted with quiet confidence.
By September 1896 the modified Turbinia was ready for trials. Numerous test runs were made with correcting modification, several sets of propellers were tested and, finally, with three wire bladed propellers on each shaft, satisfactory speeds were obtained by March 1896...
The Turbinia, although designed to demonstrate the possibility of fast steam turbine marine propulsion was, basically, a private family yacht. As such she could attend the coming great naval review at Spithead in 1897 to mark Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee. The Admiralty was fully aware of the importance of turbine propulsion and senior specialist naval officers had sailed in the Turbinia during her trials and, no doubt, the Admiralty encouraged Parsons to attend the Spithead Review. The result was the historic event of a 32.5 knot demonstration dash among the great ships of the world, to disturb the dignity of a Victorian naval occasion. The steam turbine had arrived with startling assurance.
In another paper entitled "The Origins of the Steam Turbine and the Importance of 1884" by N C Parsons, we are offered further insight into the development of the idea:
Parsons had always been a keen and practical experimenter. Lady Parsons remembers him making models using cotton reels and cardboard; another early clue is a compressed air propelled boat. The boat, about 2ft long, was very crudely made by him and incorporated in an underslung wheel driven around its periphery by a jet of compressed air.....
Perhaps the best clue comes from a note book of his, started in 1881 and entitled Gas Engines, in which the first entry reads "The gas engine suffers from two main disadvantages: one its immense weight and costliness; and two, its want of skilled attention and tendency to go wrong". By a series of logical stages he developed the concept of the gas turbine, compressing the air in one section, burning fuel in the combustion section and expanding it through a turbine to obtain work. This notebook contains probably one of the earliest sketches of a turbine wheel and turbine blades. This is rather scanty background for such an extremely well developed concept, as described in the Provisional Specifications for the 1884 patents, for which he must have considered many different aspects, conducted experiments and found satisfactory solutions...
The original inventions listed in the Parsons patent:
- A multi-stage axial flow reaction turbine
- Opposed flow to balance end thrust
- Elastically mounted bearings to damp vibration
- A shaft mounted air pump to prime the oil pump
- A shaft mounted air pump to operate the speed control system
- A multi-stage axial compressor
- A gas turbine
- The winding of the armature
- Cooling the armature by oil
- A removable commutator.
In all, this amounted to a comprehensive collection of practical patents and, one would have thought, bound to achieve instant success. But that is not the way of inventions... Parsons described the process in invention very well in his address to the British Association, of which he was President in 1904:
'If the invention, as is often the case, competes with or is intended to supersede some older method, there is a struggle for existence between the two. The new invention, like a young sapling in a dense forest, struggles to grow up to maturity, but the dense shade of the earlier and higher trees robs it of necessary light; if it could only grow as tall as the rest all would be easy and it would then get its fair share of light and sunshine. Thus it often occurs in the history of invention that the surroundings are not favourable when the first attack is made, and subsequently it is repeated by different persons and, finally, it may eventually succeed and become established'.
Sources:
Other titles in the Sir Charles Parsons symposium:
The complete text of these papers can be purchased on line from our archive.
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