Museum of Science and Industry

10 January 2012

Did you know Ferranti's Transformer Man?

MOSI (Museum of Science & Industry, Manchester) is seeking information about a series of photographs taken in the 1920s by the former Hollinwood-based company Ferranti, of a man standing next to a range of transformers. If your grandfather or a male relative worked at Ferranti's Crown Works factory during the 1920s you may recognise the man in the photograph and MOSI's archive team would love to hear from you to help put a name to his face.

MOSI holds the Ferranti company archive in its Collections Centre, as well as many collection items, and a volunteer at the MOSI archive is currently cataloguing photographs of transformers built by Ferranti in the 1920s at their Hollinwood site.  The Ferranti employee was photographed next to various transformers built between 1921-1927, probably to demonstrate scale of the equipment.

Jan Hicks, Senior Archivist at MOSI said: "We'd really like to find out who the man is.  He appears in a lot of the photographs and it would be good to be able to add his name to the catalogue record.  We're also curious to find out if he had a specific role at Ferranti, and why he was chosen to appear in the photographs. If you think you recognise him and the person you knew worked at Ferranti during the 1920s please do get in touch."

Ferranti was one of the largest manufacturers of transformers from 1895 to 1979 and exported them around the world.  Ferranti's Instrument Division built transformers at its Crown Works from 1895.  A separate Transformer Division was set up in 1921.  In 1922, Ferranti Ltd won a contract to supply seven transformers to the Mangaho power station in New Zealand. At 4,000 kilowatt-ampères, these transformers were the largest that had been made in Britain.

Transformer production became a thriving part of the company's business, boosted by the launch of the National Grid in 1926.  In 1925, Ferranti Ltd produced Britain's first million-volt arc in the high-voltage testing area of the Crown Works. This led to orders for 1,000,000-volt testing transformers from the National Physics Laboratory and GEC, amongst others.  MOSI recently acquired a decommissioned sub-station transformer originally built by Ferranti in the 1930s and which had been in operation for almost 90 years.  Transformers continued to be built at the Crown Works until the late 1940s, when the Avenue Works building was constructed.  The Avenue Works building is now occupied by the Manchester Evening News.

For more information on MOSI look up www.mosi.org.uk

For media enquiries please contact: Sarah Roe, MOSI press and publicity officer on Tel: 0161 606 0176, m: 07847 372647

Notes to editors

 ·         MOSI is the winner of the Large Visitor Attraction of the Year in the 2011 Manchester Tourism Awards

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