Alexander Bain

Scottish engineer

• Born: October 10, 1811
• Birthplace: Watten, Caithness, Scotland
• Died: January 2, 1877
• Place of death: Kirkintilloch, Scotland

Bain pioneered various applications of electricity in clockmaking and made significant contributions to the development of telegraphy, including a copying machine that is now recognized as the ancestor of the modern fax machine.

Primary fields: Communications; electronics and electrical engineering

Primary inventions: Facsimile machine; chemical telegraph

Early Life

Alexander Bain was the fifth of the eleven children of John Bain, a crofter, and Isobel Waiter, who lived in a cottage at Leanmore, between the towns of Thurso and Wick in Caithness in the far north of Scotland. He was one of a pair of non-identical twins, the other being his sister Margaret. He received his elementary education at Blacklass village school before being apprenticed to a watchmaker, John Sellars, in Wick.

In 1837, Bain went to London and worked as a journeyman clockmaker in Clerkenwell. His employer was probably John Barwise, the “chronomoter maker” who was Bain’s coapplicant for his first patent in 1841. It is not known whether Bain’s employer was the same Clerkenwell clockmaker that William Fothergill Cooke had hired in April, 1836, to make a model of his first telegraph apparatus, but it is not unlikely. Bain took advantage of the opportunities London offered to attend lectures, exhibitions, and demonstrations of electrical phenomena and technology and became fascinated by the possibility of making use of electricity in clocks. He began applying for patents for such applications, the first of which was granted on January 11, 1841, to him and Barwise for a clock whose pendulum was moved by electromagnetic impulses.

Charles Wheatstone had demonstrated a clock to the Royal Society in December, 1840, similar to the one that Bain and Barwise patented, and Bain put about the story that he had visited Wheatstone on the recommendation of a magazine editor and that Wheatstone had stolen his design after advising him not to bother taking the idea further. Wheatstone claimed to have been working on his electric clock long before meeting Bain, and it is entirely likely that the two men came up with the idea independently.

Life’s Work

The ten years following 1841 were an extraordinarily fertile period for Bain. In December of that year, he and Lieutenant Thomas Wright—also a Clerkenwell resident—took out a patent for a series of applications of electric technology to railway locomotives and signaling. Bain then introduced a crucial modification to telegraph transmission and reception, “inverting” the existing method of signaling, which used a needle pivoting under the influence of an electromagnet by suspending a movable coil between the poles of a magnet. On May 27, 1843, Bain patented a transmitting and receiving apparatus that could scan drawings and documents, which is now recognized as the ancestor of the fax machine.

Although the image-transmitting device attracted some publicity and contributed to Bain’s being described in The Times as “a most imaginative and meritorious inventor” in April, 1844, it was ahead of its time and did not give rise to any immediate practical applications. Italian physicist Giovanni Caselli subsequently built a giant version with an eight-foot pendulum that he called thepantelegraph, which sent a message from Paris to Amiens in 1856 and was used in a Paris-Lyon line between 1865 and 1870. An invention of greater practical potential in the mid-nineteenth century was the chemical telegraph that Bain patented on December 12, 1846, which recorded signals at a telegraph receiving station by recording impulses on paper impregnated with an electromagnetically sensitive solution, on the same principle as the 1843 image transmitter.

On May 15, 1844, Bain married a widow named Matilda Bowe, née Davis; they had two sons and two daughters before she died in 1856. The family had apparently moved to Edinburgh by the end of 1846; the chemical telegraph patent was filed from there. When the Electric Telegraph Company was set up in 1846 by William Fothergill Cooke and John Lewis Ricardo, Bain complained that its devices infringed one of his earlier patents, and he gave evidence in support of his claim to select committees of both houses of Parliament. The company’s sponsors were ordered to award him a payment of œ7,500, which was a large sum by his own standards, although it was very much smaller than the payments the sponsors made to Cooke and Wheatstone, the other holders of the key patents in the field.

The payment Bain received from the Electric Telegraph Company enabled him to open a showroom and manufactory at 43 Old Bond Street in the heart of London’s West End. In the Great Exhibition of 1851, he was awarded an exhibition medal for his clocks, and in May, 1852, his family was living at Beevor Lodge in Hammersmith. He probably overstretched his resources in funding this change of lifestyle; at any rate, his fortunes soon took a turn for the worse. He did not patent any further inventions of note after 1852, perhaps because he had decided to direct his energies to the exploitation of the chemical telegraph system.

Bain developed an automatic transmitting system using punched tape that enabled messages to be sent at the much higher speeds that the chemical receiver made possible, and his entire system transmitted and received information much more rapidly than the mechanical systems then in use. His system was first adopted for development in the United States by Henry O’Reilly and was subsequently taken up by others, but Samuel F. B. Morse and his associates immediately set out to kill it off, lest it supersede their own, much slower apparatus. Morse claimed patent infringement on the slender grounds that the paper tape used in the automatic transmitter was his design, and that the alphabet used in signaling was also his intellectual property, although he had not invented it. The attempt to defend the case presumably drained Bain’s resources and left him in dire straits, but there is no record of his activities in the late 1850’s and throughout the 1860’s, probably because he was not in Great Britain for much of that time. An automatic transmitting system designed by Wheatstone was, however, integrated with conventional receiving devices in the Electric Telegraph Company’s system; Bain again felt that he had been robbed, but he could obtain no recompense this time.

Bain’s other inventions included an electronic log to record the progress of ships at sea, translating signals from vanes rotating under the surface, and an electrical sounding apparatus for use at sea. Some of his electric signaling devices for use on the railways and for communication between railway carriages were adopted for use, but he does not appear to have made any money from them. He worked on dedicated telegraph systems for the use of fire and police services, but he was unable to get them adopted. He also invented a device enabling musical instruments to be played at a distance (a device of a sort pioneered by Wheatstone), a spill-proof inkwell, and a propelling pencil. He attempted some improvements to repeating firearms.

By 1872, Bain was back in Scotland repairing clocks for a living. He did some work for Lord Kelvin (William Thomson), an ingenious inventor who understood the import of Bain’s innovations, having employed a variant of Bain’s “inverted needle” system in his own siphon recorder. Kelvin took up his cause and managed to procure Bain a pension of œ80 per year, beginning in 1873, and a grant of œ150 from the Royal Society. Bain was in poor health by then, however, and when he lost the use of his legs Kelvin had to recommend him for admission to the Broomhill Home for Incurables at Kirkintilloch. After dying there, Bain was buried in the nearby Old Aisle Cemetery. His two sons survived him, but neither was living in Britain in the 1870’s. One had emigrated to the United States, and the other was apparently resident somewhere in continental Europe.

Impact

In an era when so many inventors made money from their inventions, Bain suffered more than his fair share of misfortune—a circumstance probably connected to the fact that he was a highland Scotsman of humble origin and was thus regarded with a degree of contempt in England. Had he and the users of his chemical telegraph system been able to defend it successfully against the more aggressive and worldly wise Samuel Morse and his richer associates, that technology might have been standardized alongside systems translating received messages into sound, but the battle was fought on foreign soil against opponents who far outweighed him in terms of their resources. His copying systems—which were, in hindsight, much more interesting and potentially valuable than they seemed at the time—never won him the credit or the reward they warranted while he was alive. For these reasons, the direct impact of Bain’s life and works was much less than it might have been, and it was left to historians of technology to provide respectful testimony to his awesome ingenuity.

Bibliography

Burns, R. W. “Alexander Bain.” Engineering Science and Education Journal 2, no. 2 (April, 1993): 85-93. A succinct account of Bain’s technological achievements, with particular reference to their relevance to the development of telegraphy.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. “Alexander Bain.” In the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, edited by H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. A summary of the (relatively few) recorded facts of Bain’s life, without Munro’s elaborations, which only lacks a few further details unearthed by local historians in Caithness.

Gunn, R. P. Alexander Bain of Watten. Thurso, England: Caithness Field Club, 1976. A pamphlet celebrating Bain’s life and work, produced as an exercise in local history, which includes a few trivial details of Bain’s early life not included in Munro or Burns.

Hackmann, W. D., ed. Alexander Bain’s Short History of the Electric Clock (1852). London: Turner and Devereux, 1973. A facsimile of Bain’s first pamphlet—very few copies of which survive—with a brief account of its author and a commentary on the essay’s significance as a historical document. Bain is credited with a second work, A Treatise on Numerous Applications of Electrical Science to the Useful Arts (1870), which is even rarer.

Munro, John. Heroes of the Telegraph. Whitefish, Mont.: Kessinger, 2004. A new edition of a work first published in 1883, whose ready availability in electronic form has resulted in its brief biographical note on Bain being reproduced and copied in many Internet sources, in spite of the fact that it compensates for a lack of hard information with dubious and colorfully expressed conjecture.