Winding Through 115 Years - an engineering story with a slant by Marguerite Finn
18/12/09
A Story Winding Through 115 Years
In the course of the past 125 years Norwich has seen many changes but one special corner of the city has remained pretty much the same. Hardy Road, lying close to the river Wensum and the railway line, has been host to Laurence, Scott & Electromotors (LSE) since 1896.
In September 2008, despite the global economic downturn and dire predictions about the domestic credit crunch, LSE has a full order book and on the strength of it, the company has placed ten new engineering apprentices with EAGIT for training.
Charlene Catchpole and Marguerite Finn from Eagit decided to go and have a look around LSE’s current premises. Their guide was Terry Sibley, the Factory Manager.
We found a busy and vibrant company where young and mature engineers worked alongside each other on complex pieces of engineering equipment – just as generations of engineers had done before them. One of the reasons for their success is LSE’s pride in their history and tradition and they certainly have a long and eventful history of which to be proud.
In 1883, William Harding Scott designed and built a successful dynamo – but that was just the beginning. W.H. Scott was the right man in the right place in the 1880s, as the development of electrical engineering followed on from Faraday’s discovery of electromagnetic induction in 1831.
Scott had come to Norwich to install electric light in Jeremiah Colman’s mustard plant. He was a natural engineer and his machines were well built, tested on site and they were reliable. A few years later, Scott was joined by Reginald Laurence, a mechanical and civil engineer, who was prepared to invest some money in the firm. Jeremiah Colman was an astute businessman and saw the potential of Scott’s product and made available some of his land between King Street and the River Wensum for a factory. As a result, Laurence, Scott & Co. was born and the business grew steadily. Scott’s dynamo was a winner, but his genius also lay in appreciating the many applications of a machine which produced electricity from mechanical energy if driven one way or mechanical energy from electricity if driven the other. He undertook the design and manufacture of a wide range of electrical apparatus.
As the business of designing and manufacturing electric motors expanded, the firm outgrew their original premises and in 1896 they moved into their purpose-built works at Hardy Road on the north bank of the River Wensum where they have remained ever since. The design of these works was in advance of the times, providing for a continuous flow of material and the stores through the various manufacturing sections to test and despatch. A considerable amount of work was in hand for large generators for central stations and for a growing number of motors. The company was also producing accumulator switches, automatic cut-outs, starting switches and a patent automatic fuse. Scott carried out the planning, building and equipping of the Norwich Electricity Company’s new station, which was responsible for lighting up much of central Norwich. In 1899, an order came for a power station at Lincoln to be built in the Norwich style. Orders for dynamos were soon coming in from abroad – including France, South Africa and Russia.
In designing and producing his dynamo, Scott and Laurence had taken a bold leap into the future but what was happening in the rest of the world? Let us take a quick ‘snap shot’ of the year 1883. Well, for one thing, on 26
August 1883, the massive volcano Krakatoa blew itself to pieces destroying 295 towns and villages in Indonesia and killing 36,417 people in the process. Brooklyn Bridge opened to traffic on May 24th, linking America’s two largest
cities – New York and Brooklyn. Gold Flake cigarettes were introduced into London. The economist John Maynard Keynes (who is suddenly back in fashion in 2008 and whose ideas are being championed as a way out of recession) was born. Karl Marx died. English-born inventor William Horlick, produced the first "malted milk" and gave his name to the popular Horlicks bedtime drink. Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island was on sale in the bookshops. The composer Richard Wagner dropped dead from a heart attack in Venice aged 69. Nearer to home, in London, The British Prime Minister, William Gladstone introduced the 1883 Reform Act – also known as the Corrupt Practices Act – to stop candidates using their wealth to persuade people to vote for them in elections.
Meanwhile, back in Hardy Road, the company had made 1,571 dynamos by the end of 1898 and the following year it 
made 570 more. During this time, Scott also found time to develop a high-speed engine, electric winches, ammunition hoists and cranes – which brought the firm to the attention of the Admiralty. By the outbreak of the first World War in 1914, sixty percent of the business was coming directly from the Admiralty. With the help of Boulton and Paul, Laurence and Scott’s Company built two workshops in which to make high explosive shells. Specialist tools were made in the factory - and for the duration of the war, 250 shells were made every day, totalling £1million worth. Towards the end of the war men in the shell shop were working a 67.5 hour week
A firm called Electromotors Ltd, employing 500 people, had been formed in Manchester in 1899 to make small standard DC machines and to develop an AC range. In 1929, this company amalgamated with Laurence, Scott Company to form Laurence, Scott and Electromotors (LSE).
In 1931, women were employed there for the first time - with protective sacking to keep their feet warm! You can imagine them tapping their encased feet to the popular tunes of the day – such as, ‘‘Lazy River’ by Louis Armstrong; or ‘Walking My Baby Back Home’ by Maurice Chevalier.
LSE became involved in the design and manufacture of traffic lights and made electrical equipment for diesel-electric motors. By 1955 there was a high demand for power station motors, fan motors, milling plant motors and a growing requirement for motors for pumps. Soon over 80% of all variable speed motors installed by water authorities were LSE motors.
Reginald Laurence died in 1923 and William Hardy Scott died in 1938, having founded a pioneering electrical engineering company, which put Norwich at the forefront of the technology bringing light, heat and clean water supplies to the public.
Laurence, Scott and Electromotors have had their share of ups and downs. The most recent ‘down’ was in 2007 when the Company went into administration and the future looked bleak. By a stroke of good fortune, the business was purchased by ATB Morley (Leeds) – one of the Companies owned by ATB Austria Antriebstechnik AG. ATB recognised the experience and strength of the Norwich firm and pledged to keep the production facility in the locality because of the expertise and dedication of the workforce. Today, the annual motor production is in the order of 150 units, but through modernisation of production and test areas, that quantity is expected to double over the next few years. The predominant market sectors where ATB/LSE motors are in demand are oil and gas - this makes up about 65% of the firm’s annual business. The main applications in this sphere are large pumps for injection duties. The company has also maintained its links with marine and defence applications, providing motor generator sets for the Royal Navy, electric propulsion motors for the Trident class of submarines and for commercial ships as well as off-shore oil and gas rigs. And did you know that one distinguished LSE motor drove the 8.7m Howden tunnelling machine used to dig the UK side of the Channel Tunnel?
ATB/LSE supplies electric drives for centrifugal compressors and large fan drives for combustion and air-blower applications – with desalination, nuclear power generation and the Ministry of Defence each contributing about 10%. Historically, the company also provided fan drives for conventional coal and gas fired power stations, and this now forms the basis of much of its service and refurbishment / replacement work. The power generating industry continues to be a successful market for ATB/LSE machines, for example, cooling water-circulating pump motors have been supplied to a high proportion of PWR nuclear power plants around the world.
ATB/LSE currently has an impressive list of key customers including BP Oil and Gas, Shell E & P; Rolls Royce and British Energy, Siemens, Saudi Aramco 
In a world facing unprecedented climate change, this local Norwich Company is in a key position to supply vital machinery to the energy and water industries. Our future is in their hands and ATB/LSE has both the tradition and the expertise to rise to the challenge.
