Anderton Boat Lift - article from 1920's

[Québec]

Searching the Internet Archives came across this illustrated article on the Anderton Boat Lift in 'Electrical Wonders of the World' by F. Talbot c. 1920

 

The pages have been uploaded as individual images (jpeg) and, depending on how your computer shows images, they can be read easily if you use the zoom.

 

The images open up as giant images on here, so have just provided the links.

 

Cover: Electrical Wonders of the World

Page 1

Page 2

Page 3

Page 4

Page 5

Page 6

Page 7

Page 8

Page 9

[Chris Pink]

Very interesting numbers;

 

30hp motor to run the whole show - awesome

 

17,000 boat movements in a year - busier than the K and A then.

 

0.6 to 0.9 of a "Board of Trade Unit" per lift - what is one of these?

[BuckbyLocks]

Very interesting numbers;

 

30hp motor to run the whole show - awesome

 

17,000 boat movements in a year - busier than the K and A then.

 

0.6 to 0.9 of a "Board of Trade Unit" per lift - what is one of these?

 

Think it really is a BTU which if memory serves correctly is a British Thermal Unit. I suspect it is a unit of electrical consumption, like Kilowatt Hour, but electrical engineering was a hell of a long time ago and has not featured in my life for too long to be certain anymore.

Edited November 2, 2010 by BuckbyLocks

[alan_fincher]

0.6 to 0.9 of a "Board of Trade Unit" per lift - what is one of these?

 

Think it really is a BTU which if memory serves correctly is a British Thermal Unit. I suspect it is a unit of electrical consumption, like Kilowatt Hour, but electrical engineering was a hell of a long time ago and has not featured in my life for too long to be certain anymore.

No, I don't think so.

 

Board of Trade Unit is actually an old fashioned term for what we now call a Kilowatt Hour, which was sometimes abbreviated BOTU, but soimetimes (historically) as just BTU.

 

It is not the same thing as the current meaning of the abbreviation BTU, namely "British Thermal Unit".

 

Wikipedia refers to the confusion as follows....

 

The Board of Trade unit (BOTU) is an obsolete UK synonym for kilowatt hour. The term derives from the name of the Board of Trade that regulated the electricity industry. The B.O.T.U. should not be confused with the British thermal unit or BTU, which is a much smaller quantity of thermal energy. To further the confusion, at least as late as 1937, Board of Trade unit was simply abbreviated BTU

 

So the 0.6 to 0.9 figure for each lift relates to what we now know as Kilowatt Hours.