Archive: Magician's palace

Lord Armstrong pioneered many of the domestic comforts that we now take for granted when he built his home, Cragside

The Northumberland home of Victorian innovator Lord William Armstrong – a former president of the IMechE – was designed to be comfortable and practical. Dubbed the ‘palace of the modern magician’, Cragside, near Rothbury, was an engineering marvel and the catalyst for a domestic revolution.

Servants at the house, built from 1863 onwards, would be summoned not by the traditional bell-pull but on an internal telephone system; they would cook on a hydro-powered rotisserie; they would help guests with the hydro-powered lift, based on technology used by Armstrong’s industrial cranes; hydro-powered laundry machines made quicker work of such tasks; and crockery was cleaned in a rudimentary dishwasher. In the greenhouse, peaches were automatically turned for even ripening.

Armstrong’s immense wealth came from his Elswick Works in Newcastle, where he had harnessed water to power cranes, lifts, gates and so on. He would imitate this industrial technology in his home. 

He constantly sought solutions to domestic problems. Oil lamps and candles were costly and labour-intensive. He installed an electric arc lamp in 1878, but the light was intense, unreliable, smoky and noisy.  

At the time, researchers were attempting to create thin carbon filaments that glowed when electricity passed through them. Thomas Edison tried carbonising more than 2,000 materials before he succeeded. In the UK, Joseph Swan successfully carbonised a cotton filament; it worked but the mechanism was fragile and sensitive to oxygen. He then encased the filament in glass, used gas to prevent oxidisation, and got light that was lasting and comfortable to the eye. 

Swan’s incandescent light bulbs were installed at Cragside in 1880, and there were soon more than 100 in the house. Cragside proved for the first time that safe, indoor electric lighting was feasible and beneficial to our at-home lifestyle. 


Live-in lab: Cragside

Another domestic solution at the house, now taken for granted, was heating. A warm air ventilation system heated parts of the house via ducts that were part of the building’s structure. The rooms had gratings or grilles. Two large basement rooms contained 4-inch (10.2cm) cast-iron heating pipes in multiple rows which acted as plenum heating chambers, warming air drawn from the outside before it entered the ventilation system. Newer parts of the house used a low-pressure wet heating system, with box-ended pipe coil heaters and radiators installed in the rooms. 

The electricity used to light the lamps was powered from the estate. Mains electricity did not yet exist. Power for Armstrong’s hydraulic pump came from damming the Debdon Burn. This power drove a pair of plunger pumps, which pushed water from a header tank on the pumphouse roof to a reservoir 150ft (46m) above. Artificial lakes provided a 340ft head of water which drove a turbine that supplied power to the house. Running water also came from here, and was used in a Turkish bath and shower. The whole estate was therefore used to power the house. He developed his systems to generate more power, and the house joined the mains in 1945.

Armstrong didn’t invent electricity or hydro-power, but he was probably the first person to merge the two, and the builder of the first hydro-electric power station. He believed hydro-electricity had a great future, and he also predicted solar power. He said the solar energy received by one acre in tropical areas would “exert the amazing power of 4,000 horses acting for nearly nine hours every day”. He also said that coal was used “wastefully and extravagantly in all its applications,” and in 1863 he predicted that England would cease to produce it. 

All the technology that Armstrong had installed meant that Cragside was effectively a laboratory, a mechanics workshop and a comfortable country house. 

Nowadays, the use of electricity in our homes, alongside other ‘everyday’ inventions, has revolutionised the way we live. Our evenings are no longer dark; our lives can be lived over 24 hours. Our homes are safe, comfortable places – we all live in a luxury that used to be the preserve of the few. Cragside, then, was a bridge between the old and the modern world.