On January 2nd 1877 Alexander Bain, the Scottish inventor died at Kirkintilloch.
Bain was one of the most prolific inventors of the 19th century, and is one of the least remembered. His inventions are all the more remarkable given his background.
"When the lecture was over, and the audience were leaving, a few gentlemen accompanied the lecturer, and conversed with him on the subjects of the lecture. There was a humble lad walking behind them, and listening attentively to what was said … he never forgot the lecture, nor the subsequent conversation.”
After nearly seven years of clockmaking apprenticeship, he left the north of Scotland, briefly for Edinburgh, and then London.
Working in London, Bain went to evening lectures and saw some impractical clocks that used static electricity to maintain the swing of the pendulum. He thought he could do better. By the middle of 1840 he had made a clock powered by electric current, as well as a ‘printing telegraph’. He also thought “to make a common clock transmit its time to other distant clocks…” In Bain’s first electric clock, the pendulum bob was an electromagnet swinging between two permanent magnets. In his ‘printing telegraph’, the character for transmission was selected by stopping a moving pointer at the correct location on a labelled disc. In the receiver, the printing type-wheel was rotated into position by a clock escapement released by an electromagnet, one tooth at a time, by the appropriate number of received electrical pulses.
Bain displayed his electric clock at the Polytechnic Institution, and with John Barwise, a chronometer maker, and they applied for a patent in October 1840. The next month, Charles Wheatstone, professor of physics at King’s College London, demonstrated an electric clock to the Royal Society, claiming to have invented it. Bain’s patent, ‘Improvements in the Application of driving power to Clocks and Time Pieces’ was granted in January 1841, and a furious public dispute ensued.
Bain’s cause was supported by many, including John Finlaison (a Treasury civil servant, and Actuary of the National Debt.) By coincidence, Finlaison hailed from Thurso, and had been impressed by a demonstration of Bain’s printing telegraph:
It wasn't only the electric clock he is famous for, he then 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 27 May 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”. This was way ahead of his time!
In 1844 Bain had married Matilda Bowie, the widowed sister-in-law of his greatest champion, John Finlaison, and moved his business to Edinburgh. He and his wife had five children to add to Matilda’s daughter from her first marriage.
Bain won a contract from the Glasgow and Edinburgh Railway to construct a telegraph line along their route, 46 miles long. The price quoted was £50 per mile; Cooke and Wheatstone were charging the Great Western Railway £250 per mile. Finlaison loaned £3,000 to the project and the finished system proved the capability of time distribution, with the master electric pendulum clock in Edinburgh transmitting to a "slave" clock in Glasgow.
It wasn't all plain sailing for the intrepid Scot, he traelled to America with his "electric telegraph" plans, but Samuel Morse had already built a telegraph between Baltimore and Washington D.C so was ahead in the game. After applying for a patent Morse challenged him in the courts, saying his patents already covered what Bain had laid out, it went all the way to the suoreme courts and Morse won, although the unimplemented patent claims of Morse were rejected, this was scant comfort to Bain, who left America and had to file for bankrupcy back home, the cost of his failed venture in the Americas cost him dearly.
Bain ended up pretty much back where he started, working for a watchmaker in Glasgow, repairing clocks for a living. One of his customers was the University’s William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) who recognised Bain’s genius and his plight. Thomson arranged a grant of £150 from the Royal Society, and successfully petitioned the Gladstone government to award Bain a Civil List pension of £80 per year.
Bain died on this day in 1877, cheated of fame and fortune by bad luck and poor choices. Aside from electric clocks and the chemical telegraph, he patented many other inventions, including a fire alarm; a marine depth sounder; a system for recording ships’ direction and speed at sea; a device for producing punched tape and a piano for playing the tape remotely; a current regulator for voltaic cells; a drinking fountain tap operated by pressing the receptacle on a lever, and perhaps too fondly, a device for drawing a measure of liquid from a container, similar to a bar optic for spirits.
Alexander Bain is buried in the Auld Aisle Cemetery, Kirkintilloch.
A Wetherspoons pub in Wick, close to where Alexander Bain served his apprenticeship, is now named after the inventor, it is also the most northerly Wetherspoons in the country. Also, as a tribute to his inventions, the main BT building in Glasgow is named Alexander Bain House.
There is also a commemorative plaque to Bain at his former workshop on Hanover Street in Edinburgh as seen in the pics.
As usual; I have slimmed this account of Bain's life down, if you want to read the full story check out this link https://www.slhf.org/sites/default/files/publications/slhf12_alexanderbain.pdf
