Charles Algernon Parsons

Sir Charles Algernon Parsons, (13 June 1854 – 11 February 1931) was an Anglo-Irish engineer, best known for his invention of the compound steam turbine, and as the eponym of C. A. Parsons and Company. He worked as an engineer on dynamo and turbine design, and power generation, with great influence on the naval and electrical engineering fields. He also developed optical equipment for searchlights and telescopes. Career and commercial activity Parsons was born into an Anglo-Irish family in London as the youngest son of the famous astronomer William Parsons, 3rd Earl of Rosse. (The family seat is Birr Castle, County Offaly, Ireland, and the town of Birr was called Parsonstown, after the family, from 1620 to 1901.) With his three brothers, Parsons was educated at home in Ireland by private tutors (including John Purser), all of whom were well versed in the sciences and also acted as practical assistants to the Earl in his astronomical work. (One of them later became, as Sir Robert Ball, Astronomer Royal for Ireland.) Parsons then read mathematics at Trinity College, Dublin and at St. John's College, Cambridge, graduating from the latter in 1877 with a first-class honours degree. He joined the Newcastle-based engineering firm of W.G. Armstrong as an apprentice, an unusual step for the son of an earl. Later he moved to Kitsons in Leeds, where he worked on rocket-powered torpedoes.