 The
electrical engineering department and indeed the whole Company suffered
a severe loss in 1912, when Miles Walker was appointed professor of
electrical engineering at Manchester. Walker had joined the Holy Forty
after a brilliant academic career, both legal and scientific, and
he had studied design at Pittsburgh. under B. G. Lamme. In the electrical
engineering department at Trafford Park, he was responsible for developments
in compensated a.c. generators, d.c. generators (particularly the
radial commutator), power factor improvement for induction motors,
and many types of measuring instruments. He was also a doughty champion
of the rotary converter. Though caring little for administrative responsibility
and finding factory routine irksome, he did much valuable work, and
he continued to serve the Company as a consultant for nearly twenty
years.
Walker
combined facility in the analysis of difficult problems with lucidity
in explanation, perhaps due to his early legal training, and many
electrical engineers were brought up on his works, for instance
the famous Specification and Design of Dynamo-electrical Machinery.
He was kind and humane, and a man of high moral principles, some
of which were expressed in an unorthodox presidential address to
the engineering section of the British Association. He died in 1941.
In
1913 Gilbert North, who had been in charge of instrument and meter
design and manufacture, left the Company. A man of great independence
of character and a genius in his own line. North was the originator
of many features of the a.c. meters of today. He was succeeded by
L. C. Benton.
The
introduction of British designs and the growth of electrical business
generally brought about a tendency to set up self-contained though
not independent sections, each dealing with one type of apparatus.
When Rosenberg resigned in 1915 (later to be repatriated and become
chief engineer of Elin at Linz) the electrical engineering department
was first divided vertically into a.c. and d.c. sides. This proving
unsatisfactory, a horizontal division was instituted: G. A. Juhlin
was put in charge of large machines and R. Johnson of small, both
being under J. S. Peck as chief electrical engineer. These sections
soon developed into the plant and motor engineering departments
of today. By 1918 chief engineers had been appointed for the detail
and transformer departments—W. A. Coates and A. G. Ellis.
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