Alexander Bain (inventor)

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Alexander Bain
Born October 1811
Watten, Caithness, Scotland
Died January 2, 1877
Broomhill, Kirkintilloch, Scotland
Occupation instrument inventor, technician, and clockmaker

Alexander Bain (October 1811 – January 2, 1877), was a Scottish instrument inventor, technician, and clockmaker. He invented the electric clock, the electric printing telegraph, and the first facsimile machine (fax machine). Bain installed the railway telegraph lines between Edinburgh and Glasgow.

Contents

[edit] Biography

[edit] Early life

Bain was born in Watten, Caithness, Scotland. Bain's father was a crofter. Bain had a twin sister, Margaret, and, in total, he had six sisters and six brothers. Bain did not excel in school and was apprenticed to a clockmaker in Wick.

[edit] Career

Having learned the art of clockmaking, he went to Edinburgh, and in 1837 to London, where he obtained work as a journeyman in Clerkenwell. Bain frequented the lectures at the Polytechnic Institution and the Adelaide Gallery and later constructed his own workshop in Hanover Street.

In 1840, desperate for money to develop his inventions, Bain mentioned his financial problems to the editor of the Mechanics Magazine, who introduced him to Sir Charles Wheatstone. Bain demonstrated his models to Wheatstone, who, when asked for his opinion, said "Oh, I shouldn't bother to develop these things any further! There's no future in them." Three months later Wheatstone demonstrated an electric clock to the Royal Society, claiming it was his own invention. However, Bain had already applied for a patent for it. Wheatstone tried to block Bain's patents, but failed. When Wheatstone organised an Act of Parliament to set up the Electric Telegraph Company, the House of Lords summoned Bain to give evidence, and eventually compelled the company to pay Bain £10,000 and give him a job as manager, causing Wheatstone to resign.

Bain's first patent was dated January 11, 1841, and was in the names of John Barwise, chronometer maker, and Alexander Bain, mechanist. It describes his electric clock which uses a pendulum kept moving by electromagnetic impulses. He improved on this in later patents, including a proposal to derive the required electricity from an "earth battery", which consisted of plates of zinc and copper buried in the ground.

In December 1841, Bain in conjunction with Lieutenant Thomas Wright RN, patented a method for using electricity to control railway engines by turning off steam, marking time, giving signals, and printing information at different locations. The most significant idea incorporated in the patent was his plan for inverting the needle telegraph earlier developed by Ampere, Wheatstone and others: instead of making signals by a pivoted magnetic needle under the influence of an electromagnet, he made them by suspending a movable coil between the poles of a fixed magnet. A similar concept appears in Sir William Thomson's siphon recorder. Bain also proposed to make the coil record messages by printing them, an idea he developed further in a subsequent patent.

[edit] Facsimile machine

Bain invented his facsimile machine in 1843. He used a clock to synchronise the movement of two pendulums for line-by-line scanning of a message. For trasmission, Bain applied metal pins arranged on a cylinder made of insulating material. An electric probe that transmitted on-off pulses then scanned the pins. The message was reproduced at the receiving station on electrochemically sensitive paper impregnated with a chemical solution similar to that developed for his chemical telegraph. In his patent description dated May 27, 1843 for "improvements in producing and regulating electric currents and improvements in timepieces, and in electric printing, and signal telegraphs," he claimed that "a copy of any other surface composed of conducting and non-conducting materials can be taken by these means". The transmitter and receiver were connected by five wires. In 1850 he applied for an improved version but was too late, as Frederick Bakewell had obtained a patent for his superior "image telegraph" two years earlier in 1848.

[edit] Chemical telegraph

On December 12, 1846, Bain, who was then living in Edinburgh, patented a chemical telegraph. He had seen that the Morse and other telegraphs then in use were comparatively slow, due to the mechanical inertia of their moving parts, and realized that the signal current could be used to make a readable mark on a moving paper tape soaked in a mixture of ammonium nitrate and potassium ferrocyanide, which gave a blue mark when a current was passed through it.

The speed at which marks could be made on the paper was so high that hand signalling could not keep up with it, and so Bain devised a method of automatic signalling using punched paper tape. The concept was later used by Wheatstone in his automatic sender.

Bain's chemical telegraph was tried between Paris and Lille, and attained a speed of 282 words in 52 seconds, a great advance on Morse's telegraph which could only give about 40 words per minute.

In England Bain's telegraph was used on the wires of the Electric Telegraph Company to a limited extent, and in 1850 it was used in America by Henry O'Reilly. However, it incurred the hostility of Samuel Morse, who obtained an injunction against it on the grounds that the paper tape and alphabet used fell under his patent. Consequently, by 1859 Bain's telegraph was in use on only one line and never really entered general usage.

[edit] Later life

Initially Bain made a considerable sum from his inventions but, due to poor investments, became poor, and in 1873, Sir William Thomson, Sir William Siemens, Latimer Clark and others obtained a Civil List pension for Bain from Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone of £80 per year.

[edit] Death and legacy

Bain was buried in the Old Aisle Cemetery, Kirkintilloch. It was restored in 1959. The headstone (pictured here) had a fallacious date of death (1876) which was later corrected to 1877. A pub in Wick, close to where Alexander Bain served his apprenticeship, is now named after the inventor. Also, as a tribute to his inventions, the main BT building in Glasgow is named Alexander Bain House. One of the earliest examples of an electrically impulsed pendulum clock is on display at the Deutsches Uhrenmuseum.

[edit] Further reading

Published works
  • Bain, A, "A Short History of the Electric Clocks". London: Chapman and Hall, 1852
  • Bain A, "Autobiography"London: Longmans, Green, 1904.
Other
  • Finlaison, John, "An account of some remarkable applications of the electric fluid to the useful arts, by Mr. Alexander Bain; with a vindication of his claim to be the first inventor of the electro-magnetic printing telegraph, and also of the electro-magnetic clock". London, Chapman and Hall, 1843. LCCN 08003694
  • Hackmann, W. D., "Alexander Bain's Short History of the Electric Clock (1852)" London: Turner & Devereux 1973.
  • Burns, R. W., Engineering Science and Education Journal, Vol 2, No2, April 1993.
  • Aked, C. K., "Alexander Bain. The father of electric horology". Antiquarian Horology December, 1974.
  • Hope-Jones, F', "Electrical Timekeeping". London: NAG Press, 1940.
  • Kieve J, "The Electric Telegraph. A Social and Economic History". Newton Abbot, Devon: David & Charles, 1973.
  • "Guest editorial". Perception, 2001, volume 30, pages 777 - 783 DOI 10.1068/p3007ed (ed., cover the two Bains)

[edit] External articles

Patents
Websites