Sir Francis RonaldsFRS (21 February 1788 – 8 August 1873) was an English scientist and inventor, and arguably the first electrical engineer.[1] He was knighted for creating the first working electric telegraph over a substantial distance.[2] In 1816 he laid an 8-mile (13 km) length of iron wire between wooden frames in his mother's garden and sent pulses using electrostatic generators.
Upbringing and family
Born to Francis Ronalds and Jane (née Field), wholesale cheesemongers, at their business premises at 109 Upper Thames Street, London, he attended Unitarian minister Eliezer Cogan's school before being apprenticed to his father at the age of 14 through the Drapers' Company.[3] He ran the large business for some years. The family later resided in Canonbury Place and Highbury Terrace, both in Islington, at Kelmscott House in Hammersmith, Queen Square in Bloomsbury, at Croydon, and on Chiswick Lane.[4][page needed]
Several of Ronalds' eleven brothers and sisters also led noteworthy lives. His youngest brother Alfred Ronalds authored the classic book The Fly-fisher's Entomology (1836) with Ronalds' assistance before migrating to Australia.[5] His brother Hugh was one of the founders of the city of Albion in the American Midwest,[6] and sister Emily Ronalds epitomised the family's interest in social reform.[7] Other sisters married Samuel Carter[8] – a railway solicitor and MP – and sugar-refiner Peter Martineau, the son of Peter Finch Martineau.[9]
Other inventions in this early period included an electrograph to record variations in atmospheric electricity through the day; an influence machine that generated electricity with minimal manual intervention; and new forms of electrical insulation, one of which was announced by Singer.[1][4][page needed] He was also already creating what would become the renowned Ronalds Library[14] of electrical books and managing his collection with perhaps the first practical card catalogue.[15]
Ronalds' most remembered work today is the electric telegraph he created at the age of 28. He established that electrical signals could be transmitted over large distances with 8 miles (13 km) of iron wire strung on insulators on his mother's lawn in Hammersmith. He found that the signal travelled immeasurably fast from one end to the other (but still believed the speed was finite).[17][page needed] Foreshadowing both a future electrical age and mass communication, he wrote:
electricity, may actually be employed for a more practically useful purpose than the gratification of the philosopher's inquisitive research… it may be compelled to travel... many hundred miles beneath our feet... and... be productive of... much public and private benefit... why... add to the torments of absence those dilatory tormentors, pens, ink, paper, and posts? Let us have electrical conversazione offices, communicating with each other all over the kingdom.[17]
He complemented his vision with a working telegraph system built in and under his mother's garden at Hammersmith.[18] It was infamously rejected on 5 August 1816 by Sir John Barrow, Secretary at the Admiralty, as being "wholly unnecessary".[19] Commercialisation of the telegraph only began two decades later in the UK, led by William Fothergill Cooke and Charles Wheatstone, who both had links to Ronalds' earlier work.[18][20]
Ronalds next focused on mechanical and civil engineering and design. Two surveying tools he designed and used to aid the production of survey plans were a modified surveyor's wheel that recorded distances travelled in graphical form and a double-reflecting sector to draw the angular separation of distant objects. He also invented a forerunner to the fire finder patented in 1915 to pinpoint the location of a fire, as well as various accessories for the lathe. Some of these devices were manufactured for sale by toolmaker Holtzapffel.[4][page needed] There is some evidence to suggest that he assisted Charles Holtzapffel in the early stages of preparing the Holtzapffel family's renowned treatise on turning.
Perspective machines and tripod stand
On 23 March 1825, he patented two drawing instruments for producing perspective sketches; numerous engravings and lithographs survive that he made using the machines.[24] The first of these instruments produced a perspective view of an object directly from drawings of the plan and elevations. The second one enabled a scene or person to be traced from life onto paper with considerable precision; he and Dr Alexander Blair used it to document the important Neolithic monuments at Carnac, France, with "almost photographic accuracy".[25][26] He also created the ubiquitous portable tripod stand; his original model had three pairs of hinged legs to support his drawing board in the field. He manufactured these instruments himself and several hundred of them were sold.[4][page needed] One of his first customers was mining engineer John Taylor.
In 1840, he applied his understanding of perspective in developing more complex apparatus to aid the accurate depiction of cylindrical panoramas, which were a popular exhibition at that time.[4][page needed]
Kew Observatory
Ronalds set up the Kew Observatory for the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1842 and he remained Honorary Director of the facility until late 1853. It was through the quality of his achievements there that the Kew Observatory survived its early years and it went on to become one of the most important meteorological and geomagnetic observatories in the world. This was despite ongoing efforts by George Airy, Director of the Greenwich Observatory, to undermine the work at Kew.[27]
Continuously recording camera
Ronalds' most noteworthy innovation at Kew, in 1845, was the first successful camera to make continuous recordings of an instrument 24 hours per day.[28] The British Prime Minister Lord John Russell gave him a financial award in recognition of the importance of the invention for observational science.[29]
Further instruments created at Kew included an improved version of Regnault's aspirated hygrometer that was employed for many years; an early meteorological kite; and the storm clock used to monitor rapid changes in meteorological parameters during extreme events.[27]
To observe atmospheric electricity, Ronalds created a sophisticated collecting apparatus with a suite of electrometers; the equipment was later manufactured and sold by London instrument-makers. A dataset of five years' duration was analysed and published by his observatory colleague William Radcliffe Birt.[30]
The phenomenon now known as geomagnetically induced current was observed on telegraph lines in 1848 during the first sunspot peak after the network began to take shape. Ronalds endeavoured to employ his atmospheric electricity equipment and magnetographs in a detailed study to understand the cause of the anomalies but had insufficient resources to complete his work.[4]
Last years
Ronalds' final foreign sojourn in 1853–1862 was to northern Italy, Switzerland and France, where he assisted other observatories in building and installing his meteorological instruments and continued collecting books for his library. Some of his ideas documented in this period concerned electric lighting and a combined rudder and propeller for ships that was honed in the 20th century.
He died at Battle, near Hastings, aged 85, and is buried in the cemetery there.[31][32] The Ronalds Library was bequeathed to the newly formed Society of Telegraph Engineers (soon to become the Institution of Electrical Engineers and now the Institution of Engineering and Technology) and its accompanying bibliography was reprinted by Cambridge University Press in 2013.[33]
Ronalds had a very modest and retiring nature and did little to publicise his work through his life.[34] During his last years, however, his key accomplishments became well known and revered in the scientific community, aided in particular by his friends Josiah Latimer Clark and Edward Sabine and his brother-in-law Samuel Carter. He was knighted at the age of 82. Colleagues at the Society of Telegraph Engineers regarded him as "the father of electric telegraphy",[35] while his continuously recording camera was noted to be "of extreme importance to meteorologists and physicists, and… employed in all first-rate observatories".[36] His portrait was painted by Hugh Carter.[37] Commemorative plaques have been installed on two of his former homes in Highbury and Hammersmith,[38] and a road was named after him in Highbury.[39]Ronalds Point in Antarctica is named after him.
Ronalds, Beverley Frances, Sir Francis Ronalds: Father Of The Electric Telegraph, p. 142, World Scientific, 2016 ISBN1783269197.
Ronalds, B.F. (2016). "Sir Francis Ronalds and the Electric Telegraph". International Journal for the History of Engineering & Technology. 86: 42–55. doi:10.1080/17581206.2015.1119481. S2CID113256632.
^Frost, A.J. (1880). "Biographical Memoir of Sir Francis Ronalds, F.R.S.". Catalogue of Books and Papers Relating to Electricity, Magnetism, the Electric Telegraph, &c Including the Ronalds Library. London: Spon.
^Frost, A.J. (2013). Catalogue of Books and Papers Relating to Electricity, Magnetism, the Electric Telegraph, &c. including The Ronalds Library, compiled by Sir Francis Ronalds, F.R.S. Cambridge University Press.
^Sime, J. (1893). Sir Francis Ronalds, F.R.S. and his Work in Connection with Electric Telegraphy in 1816. London.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
^"Second Annual Meeting". Journal of the Society of Telegraph Engineers. 2. 1873.