Welsh Journals

ELECTRICITY COMES TO ABERYSTWYTH Electricity must have seemed like magic to the people of the nineteenth century: electromagnets made things move, electric motors made things rotate and light was produced as if by magic, at the touch of a switch or should we say lever. Science was being utilised for humanity's benefit, the steam engine possibly being the commonest slave. Now the steam engine could be connected to the dynamo to generate electricity which could be transferred to a distant place along copper wires. Electricity was quiet, clean and obedient. On the urban scene, the initial use of electricity was to provide street lighting and to light public buildings. Previously, from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, street lighting had been provided by oil lamps. There is mention of paraffin oil replacing Colza Oil for the purpose of lighting the harbour in Aberystwyth, but oil was dirty, inefficient, and unreliable. It was replaced by gas lamps, using gas generated from coal and piped from a central gasworks. The light was called 'limelight' as the light was produced by heating a glowing piece of lime or chalk. Sometimes the undertaking would be run by the local authority, sometimes by a private company. In the case of Aberystwyth it was run by a local company called the Aberystwyth Gas Company located on Mill Street. Lamplighters were employed to keep the gas lamps serviced and lit, but again the lamps were inefficient and provided a dim light. Early in the nineteenth century, the electric arc lamp was adopted for street lighting, and, provided it was properly maintained, gave a fairly reliable bright light. The arc lamp depended on two carbon rods which gave a bright arc (spark) as they were brought together. Thus they had to be adjusted and cleaned on a regular basis. As there were two systems in operation -Gas and Electricity for quite some time, it is not advisable to consider the coming of electricity in isolation but in parallel with developments in the Gas supply. In 1879-1880 the incandescent lamp was developed in Britain and the U.S.A. This was a the forerunner of the current light bulb and was efficient and reasonably reliable. Thomas Edison developed the first incandescent filament light bulb at Menlo Park, New Jersey, USA and subsequently streets in Menlo Park were lit with these lamps as a demonstration. As with the Gas Companies, the electricity for Aberystwyth was provided by an independent company as an undertaker for the Corporation