The Varley Brothers

Abstract

IN an interesting address on the brothers Varley, who did much valuable pioneering work in telegraphy and electrical engineering, Col. Lee, of the Post Office, in a lecture on May 5 to the Institution of Electrical Engineers, pointed out that the whole progress of telegraphy during the constructive period up to the laying of the Atlantic cable was largely the history of Cromwell and Samuel Alfred Varley. This year is the hundredth anniversary of the birth of S. A. Varley. Cornelius Varley, the father of the two brothers, was a well-known scientific worker, and delivered the fourth Friday evening discourse at the Royal Institution. He was a descendant of Oliver Cromwell. The first attempts to lay an Atlantic cable having failed, Cromwell Varley served on a committee appointed by the cable company which issued a most valuable report. Later on, Cromwell Varley and Sir William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) entered into partnership as consulting engineers, being joined later by Fleming Jenkin. Cromwell Varley wrote many scientific papers, one of them published by the Royal Society describing experiments on luminous phenomena which came very near to discovering the electron. Samuel Alfred Varley did much valuable work in telegraphy. During the Crimean War, he laid the first field telegraph in 1854. His greatest invention was the self-exciting dynamo, on which he had been experimenting since he was seventeen years of age. On technical grounds the priority of this invention is generally attributed to others. At the International Inventions Exhibition in 1885, he was awarded a gold medal for inventing a self-exciting dynamo. He championed the cause of the electrical industry against the Brush patent for the compound wound dynamo. Varley's precedence in the invention was upheld after an appeal to the House of Lords and the Brush patent was declared invalid. Both the brothers Varley and the late Earl of Crawford played a leading part in founding the Institution of Electrical Engineers. Among the seventy-one founder members were four of the Varley family.