Alexander Bain (inventor) - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Alexander Bain was a Scottish inventor and engineer who was first to invent and patent the electric clock

Electric clock

An electric clock is a clock that is powered by electricity instead of powered manually or by other sources of energy, specifically in order to wind the mainspring or to drive the pendulum or oscillator.-Classification:...

. Bain installed the railway telegraph lines between Edinburgh and Glasgow.

Early life

Bain was born in Watten

Watten, Highland

Watten is a small village in Caithness, in the Highland area of Scotland, on the main road between the county town of Wick and the burgh of Thurso, about twelve kilometres west of Wick and close to Wick River and to Loch Watten. The village is on The Far North railway line but trains stopped...

, Caithness

Caithness

Caithness is a registration county, lieutenancy area and historic local government area of Scotland. The name was used also for the earldom of Caithness and the Caithness constituency of the Parliament of the United Kingdom . Boundaries are not identical in all contexts, but the Caithness area is...

, Scotland

Scotland

Scotland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Occupying the northern third of the island of Great Britain, it shares a border with England to the south and is bounded by the North Sea to the east, the Atlantic Ocean to the north and west, and the North Channel and Irish Sea to the...

. 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.

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

Clerkenwell

Clerkenwell is an area of central London in the London Borough of Islington. From 1900 to 1965 it was part of the Metropolitan Borough of Finsbury. The well after which it was named was rediscovered in 1924. The watchmaking and watch repairing trades were once of great importance...

. 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

Charles Wheatstone

Sir Charles Wheatstone FRS , was an English scientist and inventor of many scientific breakthroughs of the Victorian era, including the English concertina, the stereoscope , and the Playfair cipher...

. 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

Royal Society

The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, known simply as the Royal Society, is a learned society for science, and is possibly the oldest such society in existence. Founded in November 1660, it was granted a Royal Charter by King Charles II as the "Royal Society of London"...

, 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

Electric clock

which uses a pendulum

Pendulum

A pendulum is a weight suspended from a pivot so that it can swing freely. When a pendulum is displaced from its resting equilibrium position, it is subject to a restoring force due to gravity that will accelerate it back toward the equilibrium position...

kept moving by electromagnetic impulses. He improved on this in later patents, including a proposal to derive the required electricity from an "earth battery

Earth battery

An Earth battery is a pair of electrodes made of two dissimilar metals, such as iron and copper, which are buried in the soil or immersed in the sea. Earth batteries act as water activated batteries and if the plates are sufficiently far apart, they can tap telluric currents...

", which consisted of plates of zinc and copper buried in the ground.

In December 1841, Bain in conjunction with Lieutenant Thomas Wright RN

Royal Navy

The Royal Navy is the naval warfare service branch of the British Armed Forces. Founded in the 16th century, it is the oldest service branch and is known as the Senior Service...

, 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

Ampere

The ampere , often shortened to amp, is the SI unit of electric current and is one of the seven SI base units. It is named after André-Marie Ampère , French mathematician and physicist, considered the father of electrodynamics...

, 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.

Bain is known to have said,

Facsimile machine

Bain worked on an experimental facsimile machine in 1843 to 1846. He used a clock to synchronise the movement of two pendulums for line-by-line scanning of a message. For transmission, 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

Frederick Bakewell

Frederick Collier Bakewell was an English physicist who improved on the concept of the facsimile machine introduced by Alexander Bain in 1842 and demonstrated a working laboratory version at the 1851 World's Fair in London.-Biography:Born in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, he eventually moved to...

had obtained a patent for his superior "image telegraph" two years earlier in 1848.

Bain's and Bakewell's laboratory mechanisms reproduced poor quality images and were not viable systems because the transmitter and receiver were never truly synchronized. In 1861, the first practical operating electro-mechanical commercially exploited telefax machine, the Pantelegraph

Pantelegraph

The pantelegraph was an early form of facsimile machine transmitting over normal telegraph lines developed by Giovanni Caselli, used commercially in the 1860s, that was the first such device to enter practical service, It could transmit handwriting, signatures, or drawings within an area of up to...

, was invented by the Italian physicist Giovanni Caselli

Giovanni Caselli

Giovanni Caselli was an Italian physicist. He is the inventor of the pantelegraph , the predecessor of the modern fax machine...

. He introduced the first commercial telefax service between Paris and Lyon at least 11 years before the invention of workable telephone

Telephone

The telephone , colloquially referred to as a phone, is a telecommunications device that transmits and receives sounds, usually the human voice. Telephones are a point-to-point communication system whose most basic function is to allow two people separated by large distances to talk to each other...

Chemical telegraph

On December 12, 1846, Bain, who was then living in Edinburgh, patented a chemical telegraph. He had seen that the Morse

Morse

Morse can refer to:* Morse code, a method of coding messages into long and short beeps-Places:Canada* Morse , Saskatchewan* Morse, Saskatchewan, a hamlet* Morse No...

and other telegraphs then in use were comparatively slow, due to the mechanical inertia

Inertia

Inertia is the resistance of any physical object to a change in its state of motion or rest, or the tendency of an object to resist any change in its motion. It is proportional to an object's mass. The principle of inertia is one of the fundamental principles of classical physics which are used to...

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

Potassium ferrocyanide

Potassium ferrocyanide is the inorganic compound with formula K4[Fe6]•3H2O. It is the potassium salt of the coordination complex [Fe6]4-. This salt forms lemon-yellow monoclinic crystals.-Synthesis:...

, 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

Paris

Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

and Lille

Lille

Lille is a city in northern France . It is the principal city of the Lille Métropole, the fourth-largest metropolitan area in the country behind those of Paris, Lyon and Marseille. Lille is situated on the Deûle River, near France's border with Belgium...

, 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.

Electric clocks

Bain's electric clocks come from two stages of development between the 1840s and the 1860s. Examples can be seen in the National Maritime Museum

National Maritime Museum

The National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, England is the leading maritime museum of the United Kingdom and may be the largest museum of its kind in the world. The historic buildings forming part of the Maritime Greenwich World Heritage Site, it also incorporates the Royal Observatory, Greenwich,...

of London, the London Science Museum, the Royal Scottish Museum, and the Deutsches Uhrenmuseum

Deutsches Uhrenmuseum

The German Clock Museum is situated near the centre of the Black Forest town of Furtwangen im Schwarzwald, a historic centre of clockmaking. It features permanent and temporary exhibits on the history of timekeeping...

. The most rare and interesting mantel clocks are in private hands. One featured in the "Electrifying Time" exhibition in 1977 at the London Science Museum. Bain sometimes found complex and ornate solutions to relatively simple, although not easy to solve problems. The most complex, his mantel clock, worked on an electro-magnetic pull push, pull push for each complete period of swing employing a pendulum with opposing magnetic fields. At a very similar time, Matthias Hipp

Matthias Hipp

Matthäus Hipp also Matthias or Mathias was a German clockmaker and inventor who lived in Switzerland....

constructed a more simple and reliable system which used a simple toggle switch to impulse the pendulum every so often.

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

Civil list

-United Kingdom:In the United Kingdom, the Civil List is the name given to the annual grant that covers some expenses associated with the Sovereign performing their official duties, including those for staff salaries, State Visits, public engagements, ceremonial functions and the upkeep of the...

pension for Bain from Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone

William Ewart Gladstone

William Ewart Gladstone FRS FSS was a British Liberal statesman. In a career lasting over sixty years, he served as Prime Minister four separate times , more than any other person. Gladstone was also Britain's oldest Prime Minister, 84 years old when he resigned for the last time...

of £80 per year.

Death and legacy

Bain was buried in the Auld Aisle Cemetery

Auld Aisle Cemetery

The Auld Aisle Cemetery is located in Kirkintilloch, East Dunbartonshire, Scotland. The cemetery is protected as a category A listed building, and includes graves dating back to the eighteenth century.-History:...

, Kirkintilloch

Kirkintilloch

Kirkintilloch is a town and former burgh in East Dunbartonshire, Scotland. It lies on the Forth and Clyde Canal, about eight miles northeast of central Glasgow...

. It was restored in 1959. The headstone

Headstone

A headstone, tombstone, or gravestone is a marker, usually stone, that is placed over a grave. In most cases they have the deceased's name, date of birth, and date of death inscribed on them, along with a personal message, or prayer.- Use :...

(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