Parsons was born into an aristocratic Anglo-Irish family on 13 June 1854 in London as the youngest son of the astronomer
William Parsons, 3rd Earl of Rosse. The family seat is
Birr Castle,
County Offaly, Ireland, and the town of
Birr was called Parsonstown, after the family, from 1620 to 1901. With his three brothers, Parsons was educated at home in Ireland by private tutors, including
John Purser and
Sir Robert Ball, all of whom were well versed in the sciences and also acted as practical assistants to the Earl in his astronomical work. Parsons then read mathematics at
Trinity College Dublin, and at
St. John's College, Cambridge, graduating from the latter in 1877 with a first-class honours degree. He joined the
Newcastle-based engineering firm of
W. G. Armstrong as an apprentice, an unusual step for the son of an earl. Later he moved to
Kitsons in Leeds, where he worked on rocket-powered
torpedoes.
Steam turbine engine , built by Parsons in 1887 built for the city of
Elberfeld, Germany, in 1899 produced
single-phase electricity at 4 kV In 1884 Parsons moved to
Clarke, Chapman and Co., ship-engine manufacturers operating near Newcastle, where he became head of their electrical-equipment development. He used
Regnault's large collection of steam properties ("data of the physicists") to develop a turbine engine turning at 18,000
RPM in 1884 and immediately utilised the new engine to drive an electrical generator, which he also designed. Parsons's
steam turbine made cheap and plentiful electricity possible and revolutionised marine transport and naval warfare. Another type of steam turbine at the time, invented by
Gustaf de Laval (1845–1913) in the 1880s, was an
impulse design that subjected the mechanism to huge centrifugal forces and so had limited output due to the weakness of the materials available. Parsons explained in his 1911
Rede Lecture that his appreciation of the scaling issue led to his 1884 breakthrough on the compound steam turbine: It seemed to me that moderate surface velocities and speeds of rotation were essential if the turbine motor was to receive general acceptance as a prime mover. I therefore decided to split up the fall in pressure of the steam into small fractional expansions over a large number of turbines in series, so that the velocity of the steam nowhere should be great...I was also anxious to avoid the well-known cutting action on metal of steam at high velocity.
Founding Parsons and Company In 1889 he founded
C. A. Parsons and Company in Newcastle to produce
turbo generators to his design. In 1894 he regained certain patent rights from
Clarke Chapman. Although his first turbine was only 1.6% efficient and generated a mere 7.5 kilowatts, rapid incremental improvements in a few years led to his first megawatt turbine, built in 1899 for a generating plant at
Elberfeld in the German Empire. Within two years the
destroyers
HMS Viper and were launched with Parsons's turbines, soon followed by the first turbine-powered
passenger ship,
Clyde steamer TS King Edward in 1901; the first turbine transatlantic liners
RMS Victorian and
Virginian in 1905; and the first turbine-powered battleship, in 1906, all of them driven by Parsons' turbine engines. (
Turbinia is housed in a purpose-built gallery at the
Discovery Museum, Newcastle.)
Honours and awards Parsons was elected a
Fellow of the Royal Society in June 1898, received their
Rumford Medal in 1902 and their
Copley Medal in 1928, and delivered their
Bakerian Lecture in 1918. He served as the president of the
British Association from 1916 to 1919. He was an Invited Speaker of the
ICM in 1924 at Toronto.
Knighted in 1911, he became a member of the
Order of Merit in 1927. In 1929 the
Iron and Steel Institute awarded him the
Bessemer Gold Medal.
Surviving companies The Parsons turbine company survives in the
Heaton area of Newcastle as part of
Siemens, a
German conglomerate. In 1925 Charles Parsons acquired the
Grubb Telescope Company and renamed it
Grubb Parsons. That company survived in the Newcastle area until 1985. Parsons also designed the
Auxetophone, an early
compressed-air gramophone. == Personal life and death ==