The Reverend

Nicholas Callan
Nicholas Callan
Born
Nicholas Joseph Callan

(1799-12-22)22 December 1799
Dundalk, County Louth, Ireland
Died10 January 1864(1864-01-10) (aged 64)
Maynooth, County Kildare, Ireland
NationalityIrish
CitizenshipBritish
Alma materMaynooth College
Sapienza University
Known forDevelopment of the induction coil
Scientific career
FieldsNatural philosophy
InstitutionsMaynooth College

Nicholas Joseph Callan (22 December 1799 – 10 January 1864) was an Irish Catholic priest and physicist. He was professor of natural philosophy at Maynooth College in County Kildare from 1834, and is best known for his work on the induction coil.[1]

Early life and education

He was born and raised in Dundalk, County Louth, where he attended school at an academy. His local parish priest, Father Andrew Levins, then took him in hand as an altar boy and Mass server, and saw him start the priesthood at Navan seminary. He entered Maynooth College in 1816. In his third year at Maynooth, Callan studied natural and experimental philosophy under Cornelius Denvir. He introduced the experimental method into his teaching, and had an interest in electricity and magnetism.[1]

Callan was ordained a priest in 1823 and went to Rome to study at Sapienza University, obtaining a doctorate in divinity in 1826. While in Rome he became acquainted with the work of the pioneers in electricity such as Luigi Galvani (1737–1798) who was a pioneer in bioelectricity and Alessandro Volta (1745–1827) who is known especially for the development of the electric battery. In 1826, Callan returned to Maynooth as the new professor of natural philosophy (now called physics), where he also began working with electricity in his basement laboratory at the college.[2]

Induction coil

Callan's Induction Coil at the National Science Museum, Maynooth
Callan's Induction Coil at the National Science Museum, Maynooth

Influenced by William Sturgeon and Michael Faraday, Callan began work on the idea of the induction coil in 1834. He invented the first induction coil in 1836.[3][4][5] An induction coil produces an intermittent high-voltage alternating current from a low-voltage direct current supply. It has a primary coil consisting of a few turns of thick wire wound around an iron core and subjected to a low voltage (usually from a battery). Wound on top of this is a secondary coil made up of many turns of thin wire. An iron armature and make-and-break mechanism repeatedly interrupts the current to the primary coil, producing a high-voltage, rapidly alternating current in the secondary circuit.

Callan invented the induction coil because he needed to generate a higher level of electricity than currently available. He took a bar of soft iron, about 2 feet (0.61 m) long, and wrapped it around with two lengths of copper wire, each about 200 feet (61 m) long. Callan connected the beginning of the first coil to the beginning of the second. Finally, he connected a battery, much smaller than the enormous contrivance just described, to the beginning and end of winding one. He found that when the battery contact was broken, a shock could be felt between the first terminal of the first coil and the second terminal of the second coil.

Further experimentation showed how the coil device could bring the shock from a small battery up the strength level of a big battery. So, Callan tried making a bigger coil. With a battery of only 14 seven-inch (178 mm) plates, the device produced power enough for an electric shock "so strong that a person who took it felt the effects of it for several days." Callan thought of his creation as a kind of electromagnet; but what he actually made was a primitive induction transformer.

Callan's induction coil also used an interrupter that consisted of a rocking wire that repeatedly dipped into a small cup of mercury (similar to the interrupters used by Charles Page). Because of the action of the interrupter, which could make and break the current going into the coil, he called his device the "repeater." Actually, this device was the world's first transformer.[6] Callan had induced a high voltage in the second wire, starting with a low voltage in the adjacent first wire. And the faster he interrupted the current, the bigger the spark. In 1837 he produced his giant induction machine: using a mechanism from a clock to interrupt the current 20 times a second, it generated 15-inch (380 mm) sparks, an estimated 60,000 volts and the largest artificial bolt of electricity then seen.

The 'Maynooth Battery' and other inventions

Callan experimented with designing batteries after he found the models available to him at the time to be insufficient for research in electromagnetism. The Year-book of Facts in Science and Art, published in 1849,[7] has an article titled "The Maynooth Battery" which begins "We noticed this new and cheap Voltaic Battery in the Year-book of Facts, 1848, p. 14,5. The inventor, the Rev. D. Callan, Professor of Natural Philosophy in Maynooth College, has communicated to the Philosophical Magazine, No. 219, some additional experiments, comparing the power of a cast-iron (or Maynooth) battery with that of a Grove's of equal size." Some previous batteries had used rare metals such as platinum or unresponsive materials like carbon and zinc. Callan found that he could use inexpensive cast-iron instead of platinum or carbon. For his Maynooth battery he used iron casting for the outer casing and placed a zinc plate in a porous pot (a pot that had an inside and outside chamber for holding two different types of acid) in the centre. Using a single fluid cell he disposed of the porous pot and two different fluids. He was able to build a battery with just a single solution.

While experimenting with batteries, Callan also built the world's largest battery at that time. To construct this battery, he joined 577 individual batteries ("cells"), which used over 30 gallons of acid.[8] Since instruments for measuring current or voltages had not yet been invented, Callan measured the strength of a battery by measuring how much weight his electromagnet could lift when powered by the battery. Using his giant battery, Callan's electromagnet lifted 2 tons.[9] The Maynooth battery went into commercial production in London. Callan also discovered an early form of galvanisation to protect iron from rusting when he was experimenting on battery design, and he patented the idea.[10]

He died in 1864 and is buried in the cemetery in St. Patrick's College, Maynooth.

Legacy

The Callan Building on the north campus of NUI Maynooth, a university which was part of St Patrick's College until 1997, was named in his honour. In addition, Callan Hall in the south campus, was used through the 1990s for first year science lectures including experimental & mathematical physics, chemistry and biology. The Nicholas Callan Memorial Prize is an annual prize awarded to the best final year student in Experimental Physics.

Publications

  • Electricity and Galvanism (introductory textbook), 1832

See also

References

  1. 1 2 Boylan, Henry (1998). A Dictionary of Irish Biography, 3rd Edition. Dublin: Gill and MacMillan. p. 55. ISBN 0-7171-2945-4.
  2. ↑ Reville, William. Nicholas Callan: Priest Scientist at Maynooth. The Irish Times, 21 February 2002.
  3. ↑ Callan, N.J. (December 1836) "On a new Galvanic battery," Philosophical Magazine, series 3, vol. 9, pages 472–478; see especially page 477.
  4. ↑ Callan, N.J. (April 1837) "A description of an electromagnetic repeater, or of a machine by which the connection between the voltaic battery and the helix of an electromagnet may be broken and renewed several thousand times in the space of one minute," Sturgeon's Annals of Electricity, vol. 1, pages 229–230 and Fig. 52 on page 522.
  5. ↑ Stanley A. Czarnik (March 1992) "The classic induction coil," Popular Electronics, pages (?). Available on-line at: "The Classic Induction Coil, Induction, Coils, HV". Archived from the original on 30 October 2016. Retrieved 22 April 2016. .
  6. ↑ Guarnieri, Massimo. "Who Invented the Transformer?". ResearchGate. Retrieved 13 September 2019.
  7. ↑ The Year-book of Facts in Science and Art (p.156), 1849, John Timbs
  8. ↑ Nicholas Callan (July 1848) "On the construction and power of a new form of Galvanic battery," Philosophical Magazine, series 3, vol. 33, no. 219, pages 49–53.
  9. ↑ M.T. Casey (December 1985) "Nicholas Callan – priest, professor and scientist," IEE Proceedings, vol. 132, pt. A, no. 8, pages 491–497; see especially page 492. Available on-line at: http://eprints.nuim.ie/1767/1/CaseyCallan.pdf .
  10. ↑ Callan, Nicholas, "A means of protecting iron of every kind against the action of the weather and of various corroding substances so that iron thus protected will answer for roofing, cisterns, baths, gutters, pipes, window-frames, telegraph-wires for marine and various other purposes," British patent no. 2340 (filed: 12 October 1853; issued: 25 November 1853). See: The Mechanics' Magazine, vol. 59, no. 1576, pages 337–338 (22 October 1853).

Notes

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