Page 11 - History 2020

Sir William Armstrong at Cragside

Samuel Smiles’ engineering heroes were all of the age of steam. Sir William
Armstrong belonged to the next generation; his thing was hydraulics. He freed this up
by inventing the weighted hydraulic accumulator which used weights to create high
water pressure, one of those little-known, unglamorous inventions that helped
create the modern world. Thanks to Armstrong, hydraulics could be used anywhere,
to power cranes, lift bridges open dock-gates, operate naval gun turrets and raise
lifts. He became Newcastle’s biggest employer, also building warships and artillery.
He built a swing bridge to allow big ships to reach his works at Elswick. In 1893 he

built and installed the steam pumping engines, hydraulic accumulators and hydraulic
pumping engines for the new Tower Bridge.

Like many industrialists, Armstrong built himself a country mansion. As we’ll explore
later, this was in itself a significant cultural statement, industrialists seeking to adopt
the trappings of aristocracy. But Cragside, built on a cliff-top overlooking pine trees
and a river, had a few innovative features as you’d expect from a top engineer and

inventor. Shaw, its architect (see below), visited and marvelled at “wonderful
hydraulic machines that do all sorts of things you can imagine.”

Armstrong created five new lakes, installed a hydraulic engine,
And in 1870 a Siemens dynamo to make the world’s first hydroelectric power station.
The generators provided electricity for the estate farm and had to be continually
extended to meet increasing demands. He installed an arc lamp in his picture gallery
in 1878, but in 1880 he got hold of one of Joseph Swan’s incandescent lamps. Swan

considered Armstrong’s set-up Cragside as “the first proper installation” of electric
lighting anywhere in the world. Armstrong knew Swan and had chaired his
presentation of his new lamps to Newcastle’s Literary and Philosophical Society.
Other Cragside novelties included hydraulic lifts, central heating, a dishwasher,
vacuum cleaner, a washing machine and a spa. The house and estate buildings had
their own internal telephone system. The kitchen had a hydraulic spit. The

conservatory had a self-watering system for the pot-plants on water-powered
revolving stands. Among the pine-trees Armstrong also grew bananas. He had a
second Northumbrian residence up the road, at Bamburgh, one of Britain’s more
gigantic castles. Here the fixtures and fittings were more conventionally medieval.

However, Cragside embodies a dizzying contradiction: its architectural style. It was
designed by Norman Shaw, an eminent late-Victorian architect, who was allowed to
fully indulge his magpie imagination. The result is a rambling Victorian pile in a sort of
Arthurian ginger-bread style, a wild mash-up of gables, arches, turrets, crenellations,

tall chimneys, Tudor beams, wide Elizabethan windows, William Morris stained glass