[BITList] Cold on calling

[John Feltham]

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Preece, Sir  William Henry  (1834-1913), electrical engineer and administrator, was born on 15 February 1834 at Bryn Helen near Caernarfon, Wales, the eldest son of Richard Matthias Preece (1797-1854), stockbroker and politician, and his wife, Jane (1799-1870), daughter of John Hughes of Caernarfon. In 1845 the family moved to London, where William entered King's College School and, in 1850, King's College. His father had intended to secure William a commission in the army, but financial reverses made this impossible, and Preece left King's College in 1852. The Preeces had by then become friendly with Latimer Clark, who was to marry William's sister Margaret in 1854. Clark was an assistant to his brother Edwin, chief engineer of the Electric Telegraph Company, and together they secured Preece a job on their engineering staff in 1853.

Preece later liked to say he had learned about electricity 'at the feet of Faraday', but his contact with Michael Faraday was limited to a stint in 1853 helping with some telegraphic experiments, and he in fact acquired his knowledge of electricity on the job. After three years in London, Preece was appointed superintendent of the Electric Telegraph Company's south-western district at Southampton, in 1856. He also supervised the telegraphs of the London and South Western Railway and, from 1858 to 1862, the cables of the Channel Island Telegraph Company.

While at Southampton, Preece met (Ann) Agnes Mary Pocock (1843-1874), the daughter of a local solicitor. They married on 28 January 1864, and had four sons and three daughters before her death in childbirth in 1874. Grief-stricken, Preece left Southampton and soon settled with his children at Gothic Lodge, Wimbledon Common, Surrey. He had by then begun his long service with the Post Office telegraph system, having been named engineer for the southern district when the government bought out the private telegraph companies in 1870. He became electrician to the Post Office system in 1877 and spent the next two decades directing the expansion and improvement of the British telegraph network. He was promoted to engineer-in-chief in 1892, and on retirement in 1899 was made a KCB. He continued as a government consultant until 1904, and was also active, along with his sons Llewellyn and Arthur, in the engineering firm of Preece and Cardew. 

Preece introduced several valuable technical advances, particularly in railway signalling, but his most important work was as an administrator, writer, and public speaker. He published a widely used handbook on telegraphy (1876, with James Sivewright), two books on the telephone (1889, 1893), and over a hundred papers and lectures. He was president of the Society of Telegraph Engineers in 1880, and again (after it had become the Institution of Electrical Engineers) in 1893, and was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1881.

Of average height, stocky, and with a round face usually adorned with small wire-rimmed spectacles, Preece was a lively and impressive lecturer, and excelled at making complex subjects seem simple and understandable. Although he took great interest in new technologies, he was often complacent about the superiority of existing methods, particularly those used by the Post Office. Thus, although he had been the first in Britain to demonstrate a working telephone, he told a parliamentary inquiry in 1879 that he foresaw little demand for the device in Britain, saying the telegraph and a 'superabundance of messengers, errand boys and things of that kind' already met the need. Like other Post Office officials, Preece resisted anything that might undercut the existing telegraph system, an attitude that did much to delay the spread of the telephone in Britain.

In 1887 Preece began a long and bitter feud with the physicist and electrical engineer, Oliver Heaviside. Heaviside had found theoretically that the clarity of telegraph and telephone signals could be greatly improved by loading transmission lines with extra inductance. Reasoning from inadequate experiments, Preece had already declared inductance to be prejudicial to clear signalling; he not only dismissed Heaviside's theory as empty mathematics, but took steps to block its publication. Enraged, Heaviside thereafter missed no opportunity to denounce Preece's mendacity and scientific ignorance. American telephone engineers later made inductive loading a great practical success, but Preece always refused to give Heaviside any credit for the innovation.

Preece had pioneered an early method of wireless telegraphy, using induced currents, and in 1896 he gave an enthusiastic reception to Guglielmo Marconi's new system using Hertzian waves. Although his public praise and provision of Post Office experimental facilities did much to establish Marconi as the early leader in wireless telegraphy, Preece did not secure government control of Marconi's patents, a failure that later drew criticism.

Preece spent his last years at Penrhos, Waenfawr, his summer home near Caernarfon. He was awarded an honorary DSc degree by the University of Wales in 1911. After a long period of failing health, he died at Penrhos on 6 November 1913 and was buried on the 11th in Llanbeblig churchyard, Caernarfon.

Bruce J. Hunt 

Sources  E. C. Baker, Sir William Preece, F.R.S., Victorian engineer extraordinary (1976) + D. G. Tucker, 'Sir William Preece (1834-1913)', Transactions [Newcomen Society], 53 (1981-2), 119-36 + The Times (7 Nov 1913), 9c + The Electrician (14 Nov 1913), 253-5 + Nature, 92 (1913-14), 322-4 + H. G. J. Aitken, Syntony and spark: the origins of radio (1976) + P. J. Nahin, Oliver Heaviside: sage in solitude (1988) + D. G. Tucker, 'The first cross-channel telephone cable: the London-Paris links of 1891', Transactions [Newcomen Society], 47 (1974-6), 117-32 + B. J. Hunt, The Maxwellians (1991) + J. Kieve, The electric telegraph: a social and economic history (1973) + m. cert. + d. cert. + CGPLA Eng. & Wales (1913)
Archives Gwynedd Archives, Caernarfon, papers + Inst. ET, archives, corresp. and papers + Royal Mail Heritage, London, papers | CUL, corresp. with Lord Kelvin + ICL, letters to S. P. Thompson + UCL, corresp. with Sir Oliver Lodge
Likenesses  B. Bright, oils, 1899, Sci. Mus. · photograph, 1900-10, Sci. Mus. [see illus.] · photograph, repro. in The Sketch (6 July 1904) · photographs, repro. in 'Lost Dialogues from the "New Republic" of Plato: no. 1 - Mr W. H. Preece on the Duties of Corporations', Lightning (1 Dec 1892), 348, 349
Wealth at death  £32,320 2s. 2d.: probate, 18 Dec 1913, CGPLA Eng. & Wales · £22,074-net personalty: 23 Dec 1913, The Times



ooroo

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