Sir Charles Parsons - Guilford Street, London, UK - Citizen Memorials on Waymarking.com

A plaque, on the wall of the library, reads:
"1854 - 1931
This Library is dedicated to
Sir Charles Parsons
Scientist and Engineer who
in the XIX century invented
and perfected the compound
Steam Turbine
The memory of the great
is enshrined in books".

"Described as one of the greatest engineers that this country has ever produced, Charles Parsons attended lectures given by James Stuart on Mechanisms and Applied Mechanics in 1877, when he graduated after taking the Mathematical Tripos at St John's.

At this time, the generation of large amounts of power was posing a difficult problem. The steam engines that were used were so large and noisy that a power station in Manchester had to be closed down because of objections to the noise.

Multi-stage reaction turbineParsons, amongst others, realised the need for a rotating machine or turbine to convert the power of steam directly into electricity. He built his first multi-stage reaction turbine in 1884, when he became a junior partner in the firm Clarke, Chapman and Parsons.

He and his partners saw the potential for a steam turbine to drive electrical generators. He also had to produce the generator. The first turbo-generators, ranged in output from 1-75 kW. Three 4 ton 100kW radial flow generators were installed in Cambridge Power Station in 1895, and used to power the first electric street lighting scheme in the city.

At the same time he worked on marine steam turbines. Parsons began his experiments using a 2ft model boat towed by a fishing rod, and scaled these up to a full sized ship, the Turbinia in 1894. Ewing took part in these trials.

It is reported that the Turbinia gate-crashed the Spithead review in 1897. Immediately after the Royal inspection of the fleet by Queen Victoria, the Turbinia appeared, weaving in and out of the warships at a speed of 30 knots, uncatchable.

The bold crew consisted of the Director of Parsons Marine Steam Turbine Company, Alan Campbell-Swinton with Charles Parsons, FRS as chief engineer, and Dr Gerald Stoney, FRS stoking up the boilers in the engine rooms.

The Turbinia reached a speed of 34 knots, when the fastest destroyers of the day only managed 27. This was due to the success of two innovations both the steam turbine for ship propulsion, and the slender hull. The latter design detail was revived by John Wishart in 1997 for his ship 'Cable and Wireless' when he made an attempt to circumnavigate the globe in under 80 days in a powered vessel

Following this exploit which, of course, gained the attention of the Admiralty, Parsons set up his company 'Parsons Marine Steam Turbine Company' in 1897. Two years later, a turbine driven destroyer, the HMS Viper, capable of 30 knots was launched.

This was followed by the HMS Cobra and then in 1906, the HMS Dreadnought, with a top speed of 21 knots, which was described as the ship that made all its contemporaries obsolescent.

By the time of the battle of Jutland in 1916, super dreadnoughts were already being used.

It is said that Charles Parsons sketched the original design for the reaction blades in his turbine on the back of an envelope, and this remained the standard for many years. It took £100,000 of research to improve its efficiency by 2%, a testimony to the instinctive knowledge of a true genius.

Charles Parsons took out over 300 patents. He was also a family man, and some of his inventions: a powered model helicopter, monoplane and three-wheeled go-cart were used to entertain his children. His daughter Rachel Mary later continued in his shoes, taking the Mechanical Sciences Tripos at Newnham."

Source University of Cambridge.