Electric street lighting in Wimbledon dates back to 1899 when a brand new power station opened in Durnsford Road.

The designer was Arthur Preece but it was his father, the famous engineer Sir William Henry Preece (1834-1913), whom we should really thank for the replacement of dingy Victorian street oil lamps by modern electricity.

Not just that – he also introduced London’s first home telephone.

William Henry Preece lived with his family at Gothic Lodge in Woodhayes Road, near Wimbledon Common, from 1874 until his death in November 1913.

Exactly 114 years ago this month in 1898, he became President of the Institution of Civil Engineers.

He was knighted the following year after retiring from a long engineering career with the Post Office.

Both moves were recognition of his extraordinary contribution to technological progress in Britain as a whole and he continued as an advisor to the Government for some years later.

Preece, who came from Caernarvon, Wales, was educated at King's College School when it was still located in The Strand, long before its move to Wimbledon in the 1890s.

He later graduated from university in electrical engineering after studying under the famous physicist, Michael Faraday.

His career had begun at sea when he was chief engineer with the Electric and International Telegraph Company, repairing telegraph cables to the Channel Islands.

From 1870 he worked with the Post Office telegraphic system, eventually becoming its chief engineer and contributing his own inventions and those of others to the system.

In 1877 he demonstrated the first of Alexander Graham Bell’s new telephones at the year’s British Association for the Advancement of Science gathering in Plymouth.

However, at the time he felt no need to have one in his own home. There were plenty of human messengers around who could be employed to run everyday communications.

In 1880 he became President of the Society of Telegraph Engineers and in 1884, by detecting electro-magnetic radiation from buried telephone cables, he came up with the idea of wireless telegraphy.

In 1889 he carried out a successful experiment by transmitting and receiving Morse radio signals over a distance of about a mile across Coniston Water in the Lake District.

So he was already a longstanding pioneer in telecommunications when he befriended the young Guglielmo Marconi in the 1890s and secured funding from the Post Office for his practical experiments in wireless telegraphy.

Marconi often visited Preece in Wimbledon and established a transmitter in the back garden of Gothic Lodge to send messages to the Post Office in central London.

This time Preece changed his mind about a home phone and Gothic Lodge became London’s first with its own telephone.

He didn’t stop there. The house also became the first with electricity installed for lighting, heating hot water and supplying an iron. Eager to apply this experience for the wider public good, in 1890 he urged the local authority to build a power station to supply electric street lighting for everyone.

Amazingly with hindsight the idea was rejected. The authority preferred to rely on gas or oil and as there were no gas mains for Wimbledon’s many new streets, residents had to make do with oil lamps.

The Corporation of London was rather more imaginative as far as Wimbledon’s interests were concerned.

In 1894 it asked Preece to demonstrate the effectiveness of public electric lighting and for three months he had 76 electric lamps suspended in Wimbledon High Street.

Nevertheless, although this was a great success it was another five years before Preece’s son was able to convince the new Wimbledon Urban District Council to support a Parliamentary bill permitting it to create an electricity station.

The one in Durnsford Road generated its first electricity on 17 July 1899.

The Wimbledon Society is working with the Wimbledon Guardian to ensure that you, the readers, can share the fascinating discoveries that continue to emerge about our local heritage.

For more information, visit wimbledonsociety.org.uk and www.wimbledonmuseum.org.uk.

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