The Generation Game

We take for granted that with the flick of a switch, turn of a thermostat, dial up on a shower and in fact anything relying on a power supply will, well, just bring forth light, heat, hot water and facilitate all manner of creature comforts.

These things relate to our own domestic environments and lifestyles.

So, upscale everything to a commercial and industrial scale and reliability, dependability and economy are paramount to keep machines and processes operational.

In the Victorian era the inspired inventors of that time sought to establish a system of power very much like that of the National Grid today. It was an ambitious idea.

In the late 19th century, what was termed a hydraulic network might have been used in a factory, with a central steam engine or water turbine driving a pump and with a system of high-pressure pipes transmitting power to various machines. This was very much on a small scale.

In fact the  idea of a large public hydraulic power network was suggested as early as 1812. William Armstrong began installing systems in England from the 1840s, using low-pressure water, but a breakthrough occurred in 1850 with the introduction of the hydraulic accumulator, which allowed much higher pressures to be used.

The first public hydraulic network under an 1872 Act of Parliament was in the port and city of Hull, in Yorkshire, England.

A provision of the Act was that  a million gallons of water a day from the River Hull could be used at a cost of £12 10s per 250,000 gallons per year to the Hull Corporation. In this way it was also the first public utility in Hull.

With legislation in place the Hull Hydraulic Power Company began operation in 1876 from a purpose built power station on Machell Street just a few yards away from the tidal River Hull as it runs along a north to south axis before spilling out into the Humber Estuary.

In technical terms it was a major civil engineering feat. The pumping station, a low brick building with a large cast iron roof tank, ancillary buildings including a hydraulic accumulator and a large chimney stack was the steam powered engine room for a network of interconnected pipes under the city.

Machell Street- today

The six inch diameter pipes ran for some two and a half miles to serve plant and machinery in the thriving Freight and Timber Docks. In this way the infrastructure of the Port could be operated on demand and this included the distinctive dock cranes, heavy lock gates to and from the estuary and the heavy machinery which was associated with ships and shipbuilding.

Anyone who has lived around the river will be familiar with its languid, brown passage even in full flow when draining the East Yorkshire hinterland. The roof tank, manufactured by Stacey Davis and Co from their Phoenix Foundry in Derby, allowed the mud and silt to settle out of the huge volume of water so that it would not enter into the power plant.

By 1895, pumps rated at 250 hp , a major output for the Victorian era, took in some 500,000 imperial gallons of water into the system each week. The accumulator boosted working pressure to 700 psi. At a suitable distance along the main pipework were isolation valves and also air cocks to be able to drain the system of air.

Customers were able to access the system from 'T' pieces of 2", 3" and 4" from the main pipework. In this way some 58 machines of diverse type and location came to be powered by the system.

There were other private hydraulic systems installed at Hull's Albert Dock in 1869 and Alexandra Dock in 1885.The success of such systems led to them being installed in places as far away as Antwerp in Belgium, Melbourne and Sydney in Australia, and Buenos Aires in Argentina.

The Machell Street plant operated continuously from 1876 and it was only after damage inflicted on the pipework and infrastructure in the severe bombing of Hull in the second world war that prohibitive repair costs led to the company being wound up in 1947.

Hull City Council erected a Blue Plaque in 1990 to mark the historic significance of the Machell Street premises as the first public hydraulic power station in the UK.

                            The building is in some use today for storage, workshops and tyre fitting.