Charles Tilston Bright
Sir Charles Tilston Bright (1832-1888) of the Atlantic Telegraph Co.
General
1832 Sir Charles Tilston Bright, telegraph engineer, was born at Wanstead, Essex, on 8 June. He was the third, and youngest, son of a manufacturing chemist, Brailsford Bright, and Emma Charlotte, daughter of Edward Tilston.
1840-1847 He was educated at the Merchant Taylors' School but did not attend university due to his father's lack of income. He and his elder brother, then worked for the Electric Telegraph Co, a company formed following the patents of Cooke and Wheatstone.
1852 Bright joined the Magnetic Telegraph Co (MTC), and his brother later became the manager. He laid many telegraph lines for this company: between and within London, Manchester, Liverpool, and other cities. He showed initiative in organisation and mechanical aptitude. He also laid the first deep-water cable of six-wires, between Port Patrick in Scotland and Donaghadee in Ireland; it was only the third sea cable laid. He also experimented with long-distance transmission of telegraph signals.
Together with his brother, he held wide-ranging patents on telegraphy, although theses were of mechanical inventions rather than electrical - but with electrical uses. One of these was ‘teredo tape’ for submarine cables, an abrasive layer used to blunt the teeth of teredo worms trying to bore into a cable.
1853 On 11 May, Bright married Hannah Barrick, the daughter of John Taylor, a merchant of Hull. They had three daughters, of whom Beatrice (1861–1940) became a well-known portrait painter, and three sons, of whom Charles (1863–1937) became a telegraph engineer, wrote an authoritative treatise on telegraph cables, and was knighted.
1856 Bright, with Cyrus Field and John Watkins Brett, formed the Atlantic Telegraph Co to construct and operate a new telegraph. The capital, mostly British, was quickly found. William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) was one of the directors, and the company's electrician was E. O. W. Whitehouse. Late in the year, Bright was appointed engineer-in-chief to the company, but he was too late to influence the design of the cable, which he thought to have too small a conductor.
1857 The British and American governments each supplied a large ship for the laying operation, which began from the Irish side, in June. Approximately three hundred miles out, the cable snapped and could not be retrieved from the depths.
1858 Bright redesigned the brakes on the paying-out equipment and new cable was made to replace the one abandoned on the sea bed - a second attempt took place, starting mid-Atlantic so that the hardest task was attempted first. Work commenced at the end of July and the two ships reached their respective desinations seven days later. At the age of only twenty-six, Charles Tilston Bright was knighted in Dublin. The cable failed in October, probably due to damage, but by then it had demonstrated that the use of long undersea cables was practicable.
1858 Knighted. [1]
1861 Bright left the MTC, but remained a consultant. He went into partnership with Josiah Latimer Clark as a consulting engineer, and oversaw most of the cable-laying in both the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf. Also at this time, and jointly with Clark, Bright suggested that the British Association should recommend a system of electrical units - names such as ‘volt’ and ‘ohmad’, from the names of scientists.
1862 He became a member of the Institution of Civil Engineers.
1865 Became an independent Liberal MP for Greenwich until 1868.
1868 Bright laid a cable from Key West in Florida, to the island of Cuba.
1869 He broke off his partnership with Clark, believing that the large telegraph companies would depend on the skills of their own staff in preference to independent consultants. He began mining for lead and copper. Between 1862 and 1865, he and his brother had mined copper in southern France, without commercial success. From 1865 to 1867, they mined in Somerset.
1871 By now there were thousands of miles of cable in the West Indies, although the work had been arduous because of the changes in sea depth and contagious illnesses suffered by the crews in such a tropical area. Bright was also sick - so weak from the effects of malaria that he had to go back to England and leave his work abandoned. This episode was to weaken his health for the rest of he life - unable to lay any more cables. He became a member of the Society of Telegraph Engineers on its foundation.
From 1873 the Bright brothers successfully mined copper in Serbia, but eventually they had to abandon the mines after war broke out there. During this period Bright became less active in telegraphy, although he patented a telegraphic fire-alarm system in 1876.
1881 Bright was one of the British delegates to the Paris Exhibition and was made a member of the French Légion d'honneur .
1886 He became president of the Society of Telegraph Engineers, just before it became the Institution of Electrical Engineers.
1888 Charles Tilston Bright died suddenly, of apoplexy, at his brother's house, Goldie Leigh, Abbey Wood, near Erith, Kent, on 3 May. He was buried in the family vault at Chiswick on 7 May.
Obituary
See Charles Tilston Bright: Obituary
See Also
Sources of Information
- ↑ The Engineer 1858/09/10