ln the 1830s, nofashion-conscious woman ventured out of doors without her poke bonnet. Bonnets were big and growing bigger, with crowns built to accommodate increasingly elaborate hairdos and festooned with flowers, feathers and coloured ribbons. Butthestand-outfeature was the enormous brim, a rigid ruff of cotton orsilksticking up atan angle that defied both gravity and logic. And women weren’t alone in their enthusiasm forthe wide-brimmed bonnet. Men-about-town wore top hats, but for men of science the bonnet had hidden attractions. The springy, silk-covered wire that held those brims aloft was sturdy, flexible and insulated – all ideal qualities for experimenting with electricity. Dock labourer William Henley might seem an even less likely follower of ladies’fashion. But unlike the bonnet-wire makers, he foresaw a huge demand for insulated wire. When he builta super-efficient version of a bonnet-wire maker’s wrapping machine, he paved the wayforan industry.
ONE day in 1829, William Henley packed a few belongings and climbed aboard the London stagecoach. He was 16 and had had more than enough of small-town life and a dreary job in the family leatherworks. It was time to try his luck in the metropolis.
As he bumped along the rutted road to London, things were happening in the city that would soon change his fortunes. In a laboratory in the basement of the Royal Institution, Michael Faraday was fiddling about with a length of copper wire, some string and a few strips of calico. He was making a copper coil to carry an electric current.
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If his experiment was to work, he needed to insulate each turn of the wire from the next. And so, as he shaped the wire, one turn at a time, he wound a cotton string along the sides, slid a piece of calico between the layers and fixed the wrappings in place with varnish. It was a chore.
As the great experimentalist began to get to grips with the principles of current electricity and pondered the relationship between electricity and magnetism, the lad from the leatherworks was labouring in London’s docks. He could earn half-a-crown a day and usually picked up four days work each week. He didn’t mind. The free day gave him extra time to bone up on physics and chemistry, optics and mechanics and indulge his interest in that most fashionable of phenomena: electricity.
He taught himself how to make his own apparatus and electrostatic machines, although when he made a Leyden jar – a type of early capacitor – it gave him such a shock he dropped it. In 1830, when an aunt gave him £2 he blew the lot on an old lathe and vice, and a plank to build a workbench. Soon his one-room lodging had become a workshop.
In the grander surroundings of Mayfair, Faraday had also been busy. On 29 August 1831, he discovered electromagnetic induction, the principle behind the electric transformer and the generator. This was the breakthrough that would elevate electricity from scientific curiosity to a powerful technology. But progress would be slow if every piece of electrical wire had to be swaddled in cotton the way Faraday had done it.
According to historian Allan Mills of the University of Leicester, Faraday and his fellow experimenters had made the delicate coils of their earlier galvanometers from ready-insulated wire. They bought this wire from manufacturers of tapestries and other fine furnishings, who had for centuries trimmed their wares with fine copper or silver wires wound about with silk ribbon. Loosely wound, the spiralling ribbon produced a striped effect against the bright metal. But for a solid colour, the ribbon was wound more closely. No matter how you bent or shaped the wire, the elastic silk stayed put without exposing the metal core.
“None of the bonnet-wire makers had acumen enough to see there would be a booming industry to supply”
It was ideal for a galvanometer, but Faraday needed something more robust when he wound his famous induction ring, says Mills. He needed a wire that wouldn’t blow when he sent larger currents through it, and ideally one made of copper. Silver was a good conductor but too expensive; iron was cheap but a lousy conductor; copper conducted six times as well as iron and was affordable.
The electrical pioneers had to make do with bell wire, a copper wire used to link the elegant bell-pulls of upper-class drawing rooms with the service bells in the servants’ quarters. Bell wire was sturdy and flexible but it was bare. And so Faraday had to juggle wire, string and strips of cloth as he tried to insulate his coils. This was a fiddly, time-consuming task and the resulting coil was more than 50 per cent insulation. “That would be a gross waste of space in solenoids, motors and other emerging electrical instruments,” says Mills.
Faraday and his contemporaries may have been engrossed in their experiments, but not to the exclusion of all else. One thing that hadn’t escaped their notice was the changing fashion in hats. And one style in particular caught their eye – the poke bonnet. The bonnet’s immense brim was stiffened with an edging of springy iron wire camouflaged by a covering of coloured silk or cotton thread.
Milliners bought in ready-covered wire in the latest colours from the haberdasher, but the people who wrapped the wire for the haberdashers were the bonnet-wire makers. They coated their wire using a simple hand-powered machine that fed the wire through a spindle and wrapped the emerging end in one or two layers of thread. The result was a wire with a thin, flexible coating that wouldn’t part when bent. Unfortunately, the wire was iron, but that was easily remedied. “A lot of people were interested in electricity. It wasn’t long before some of them were taking a few pounds of copper wire along to some friendly bonnet-wire maker to wind silk or cotton around it for them,” says Mills.
Some instrument manufacturers ordered more wire than they needed, selling the surplus for a tidy profit. One man, William Ettrick, patented his own version of the bonnet-wire maker’s machine, which he claimed would turn out 400 feet of insulated copper wire an hour. But still no one quite grasped how big the electrical industry was going to be – except William Henley.
By 1836 he was a skilled mechanic and had begun to sell some of his instruments. “He soon realised that this was better than labouring in the docks,” says Mills. And after one satisfied customer, the local chemist, began to display Henley’s electrical apparatus in his shop window, orders began to pour in. It was time to give up labouring and go into business.
Henley’s instincts were spot on. The market for electrical devices was about to take off, and they all needed insulated copper wire. Soon he had made a wire-wrapping machine with not one set of spools and spindles but six, all turned by a single handle. Even if he sold his wire at half the going rate, he could make £1 a day, four times his docker’s wage. “He saw the commercial possibilities of making large amounts of wire and selling it,” says Mills. “None of the bonnet-wire makers had acumen enough to see there would be a booming industry to supply. They missed a trick, and when bonnets went out of fashion they went bust.”
The home-made wire-wrapping machine was the start of what became a vast business in telegraphs and cables. With the machine in operation, Henley hired a man to turn the handle while he made instruments for Charles Wheatstone, who needed an “intelligent mechanic” to help him develop his electric telegraph system. A few years later Henley had set up a rival telegraph company, invented a better telegraph machine and run overhead wires the length of the country. By the 1850s, he was king of the cable business, specialising in ocean-spanning submarine cables. He ploughed all his profits into his works until eventually his empire included three cable-laying ships, his own dock, a railway line and an ironworks in Wales.
Unfortunately, it didn’t include accountants, managers or investors, and in 1877, after one of his ships had sunk and the ironworks had swallowed up all his money, he went the way of the bonnet-wire makers. But electrical cables never went out of fashion, and although Henley was bankrupt, there were plenty of investors willing to keep his company going. They didn’t need much foresight to see that demand for cables and wires would just keep on growing.
