Powerhouse
Powerhouse
In Brief
By 1904 coal
gas was a well-established source of energy for urban
streetlights and homes, but electricity generation was only
beginning to ramp up. Dublin's principal power plant, the
Dublin Corporation Electric Light Station, was at 49-56 Fleet
Street, two blocks south of the Liffey in the area now called
Temple Bar. (Temple Bar, the street, makes a continuous
walking thoroughfare with Fleet Street.) As Stephen walks down
the street in Wandering Rocks he hears "The whirr of
flapping leathern bands and hum of dynamos from the
powerhouse."
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The first image here shows the huge "leathern bands"
that linked the kinetic engines (no doubt steam-powered) to
the "dynamos" (invented by Michael Faraday in 1831)
that generated the electricity. My thanks to Vincent Van Wyk
for calling my attention to this rare photograph––it seems to
be the only one of this power station––and to the fact that
today the building is occupied by the Thunder Road Cafe. Above
the windows of the restaurant one can still see the flat
arches that held windows on the Fleet Street wall of the Light
Station.
In a 2016 web article the archivists at ESB, Ireland's
leading energy company, note that "In Dublin, the first
electric arc lamp was established outside the offices of the
Freeman’s Journal on Prince’s Street in 1860. Subsequently,
the Dublin Electric Light Company was established in 1880,
with a small generating station at Schoolhouse Lane. It was
given permission to erect a number of electric lights around
the city, including Stephen’s Green and Nassau Street. By 1881
there were 17 arc lamps in use in Dublin, rising to 114 a year
later. While arc lamps were used to light the main streets of
the city, side streets continued to be lit mainly by gas lamps
until the more efficient tungsten filament gas filled lamp
became available.... In 1892, Dublin Corporation opened a new
generating station at Fleet Street with an output of 0.9
megawatts, which was soon replaced by a new station at Pigeon
House Fort on the estuary of the River Liffey in 1903,
which had a generating capacity of 3 megawatts"
(esbarchives.ie/2016/02/29/the-story-before-the-shannon-scheme).
Ca. 1900 photograph of the interior of the Dublin Corporation Electric Light station on Fleet Street. Source: esbarchives.ie.
