Samuel Alfred Varley (1832–1921) was an English electrical engineer. He was one of ten children born to

Cornelius Varley Cornelius Varley, FRSA (21 November 1781 – 2 October 1873) was a British water-colour painter and optical instrument-maker. He invented the graphic telescope and the graphic microscope. Biography Varley was born at Hackney, then a village ...

and Elizabeth Livermore Straker.

Career

In 1852, Samuel started work for the

Electric Telegraph Company The Electric Telegraph Company (ETC) was a British telegraph company founded in 1846 by William Fothergill Cooke and John Ricardo. It was the world's first public telegraph company. The equipment used was the Cooke and Wheatstone telegraph, ...

Manchester Manchester () is a city in Greater Manchester, England. It had a population of 552,000 in 2021. It is bordered by the Cheshire Plain to the south, the Pennines to the north and east, and the neighbouring city of Salford to the west. The t ...

. His brother, C. F. Varley, had been employed by the same company since 1849. During the 1850s, Samuel was involved in supervising field telegraphs in the

Crimean War The Crimean War, , was fought from October 1853 to February 1856 between Russia and an ultimately victorious alliance of the Ottoman Empire, France, the United Kingdom and Piedmont-Sardinia. Geopolitical causes of the war included the de ...

.The Varley brothers. Nature. 1932
/ref> He also published papers on cable signalling. In 1861, Samuel took over the running of a telegraph factory in London, owned by his father.

Inventions

In 1866, he was among the first to make a self-excited dynamo. Other contenders were

Charles Wheatstone Sir Charles Wheatstone FRS FRSE DCL LLD (6 February 1802 – 19 October 1875), was an English scientist and inventor of many scientific breakthroughs of the Victorian era, including the English concertina, the stereoscope (a device for di ...

and

Werner von Siemens Ernst Werner Siemens (von Siemens from 1888; ; ; 13 December 1816 – 6 December 1892) was a German electrical engineer, inventor and industrialist. Siemens's name has been adopted as the SI unit of electrical conductance, the siemens. He foun ...

. He also invented compound winding for dynamos.Samuel Alfred Varley(Obit) Nature 1921
/ref> In 1873, he read a paper at the Society of Engineers. The subject was "Railway Train Intercommunication" and he described a system fitted to the

London and North Western Railway The London and North Western Railway (LNWR, L&NWR) was a British railway company between 1846 and 1922. In the late 19th century, the L&NWR was the largest joint stock company in the United Kingdom. In 1923, it became a constituent of the Lo ...

Royal Train.

Family

In 1860, Samuel married Emily Andrews and the couple had seven children.

Death

Samuel died at Abbottsacre Lodge, Abbott's Road,

Winchester Winchester is a City status in the United Kingdom, cathedral city in Hampshire, England. The city lies at the heart of the wider City of Winchester, a local government Districts of England, district, at the western end of the South Downs Nation ...

on 4 August 1921.

References

1832 births 1921 deaths English electrical engineers English inventors {{England-engineer-stub