Arthur O. Austin

Arthur O. Austin
Austin in 1933
Born	(1879-12-28)December 28, 1879 Stockton, California, U.S.
Died	June 7, 1964(1964-06-07) (aged 84) Barberton, Ohio, U.S.
Alma mater	Leland Stanford University
Occupation	Engineer
Known for	Austin transformer
Engineering career
Discipline	Electrical

Arthur Oswin Austin (December 28, 1879 – June 7, 1964) was an American electrical engineer and inventor. A native of California, Austin graduated from Leland Stanford University with a degree in electrical engineering. He lived for a few years in New York where he worked for General Electric and the Lima Insulator Company, but spent most of his adult life in Ohio where he married, worked for the Ohio Brass Company and founded the Austin Insulator Company. He bought a large estate in Barberton, Ohio, lived in the mansion, and built an extensive outdoor electrical laboratory on the grounds.

Austin's research included improvements to radio transmission equipment and the effects of lightning on high-voltage transmission lines and aircraft. He is most known as the inventor of the Austin transformer, a double-ring toroidal transformer used to supply power for lighting circuits on radio towers. He had 225 patents, was a fellow of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers and of the Institute of Radio Engineers, and became known as an expert in high-voltage insulators and fittings. His work on transmitting antennas included both military and civilian projects.

Personal life

Arthur Oswen Austin was born on December 28, 1879, in Stockton, California, to Oswin and Mary Hamman Austin. In 1903 he graduated from Leland Stanford University with a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering. In 1907, Austin married Eleanor Briggs from Rochester, New York. The couple were in an accident in 1919 in which Eleanor was killed and Arthur was injured. In July 1921 Arthur married Augusta Briggs, Eleanor's younger sister. They had two daughters: Barbara, who died in infancy, and Martha, who died in 2017 at the age of 91.

O. C. Barber mansion

By the 1920s, Austin was a wealthy man. In 1926, he purchased several hundred acres from the estate of O. C. Barber in Barberton, Ohio. The estate included a 50,000 sq ft (4,600 m²) mansion in which Austin's family resided, and barns built in the French Renaissance Revival style which were converted to workshops and laboratories. Construction was of red brick, white concrete block, royal blue trim, and red terra cotta tile roofs. The house, which had gold-leaf ceilings, was described in 2005 by the Akron Beacon Journal as having 52 rooms, "a breathtaking vista from its east-side perch", and being "the most opulent residence between New York City and Chicago". The house was surrounded by 35 ancillary buildings including barns.

Austin died on June 7, 1964, in Barberton after a long illness. After his death, his heirs were unable to maintain the estate and tore down the house. There was an effort on the part of the Barberton community to preserve the property for its historic value, but funding could not be secured. Parts of the estate have been placed on the National Register of Historic Places and preserved as the Anna–Dean Farm. As of 2024 the Barberton Community Foundation manages the A.O. Austin Engineering Scholarship Fund, awarded to Barberton students seeking post-secondary engineering degrees.

Career

Austin (center foreground) in a lab in 1905. Probably either General Electric or Pacific Gas and Electric.

After college, Austin worked for General Electric in Schenectady, New York and Pittsfield, Massachusetts. He reportedly did not like the cold weather and stayed for less than a year. He returned to California where he managed insulator inspection and development for Pacific Gas and Electric in San Francisco. In 1906, he moved to Lima, New York, to work for the Lima Insulator Company. The company's factory was destroyed by fire in 1908, after which Austin moved to Ohio to work for Akron Hi-Potential Porcelain Company, which started operations on November 1,1906. Akron Porcelain became a subsidiary of the Ohio Brass Company which in turn was purchased by Hubbell in 1978.

During the First World War, the US Navy planned work on a military radio facility in Monroe, North Carolina, using arc converter transmitters produced by the Federal Telegraph Company, generating approximately 1 MW of power. Ohio Brass was contracted to supply the antenna insulators, with Austin assigned to the project. The war ended before Federal could deliver the arc converters and the station was never built.

Austin invented an electrically heated, oil filled porcelain insulator used to support radio transmission towers. Previous porcelain insulator designs had sufficient mechanical strength and electrical insulation for their intended purpose, but could be fragile enough that a tower might be brought down by a vandal with a .22 caliber rifle. Austin's design used a porcelain tube in combination with a bakelite sleeve, the later having sufficient strength to support the tower if the porcelain was damaged. The porcelain was kept under compression, increasing its strength. The assembly was filled with oil kept warm by a 120-watt electric heater; a thermostat kept the exterior of the insulator above the dew point, preventing moisture from condensing on its surface which would result in RF leakage. The resistance to condensation in damp weather led Spokane Washington's radio station KHQ to use this type of insulator in their 826-foot (252 m) 5,000 Watt transmission tower which the Spokesman-Review described in 1945 as "the tallest self-supporting tower in the world".

Over the course of his career, Austin was issued 225 patents, the first in January 1910. A 1928 patent described an insulated perch which prevented birds from resting on electrical transmission line insulator strings. Austin, considered one of the country's foremost experts in high-voltage insulators and fittings, was a fellow of both the American Institute of Electrical Engineers and Institute of Radio Engineers.

WHK transmitter antenna

U.S. Patent 1,968,868 for an insulated radio tower.

In the late 1920s, AM radio station WHK in Cleveland, Ohio was investigating ways to improve their signal coverage. Chief engineer E. L. Grove believed that the station's poor signal coverage was due to the effect of other steel-frame buildings in the vicinity of their transmitter site atop a downtown office building, poor grounding, and power loss from the antenna's support towers. After obtaining permission from the Federal Radio Commission, a new transmitter was built on a hill nine miles south of the city, leaving the studio downtown. Grove consulted with the Ohio Brass Company, where Austin was the chief engineer. A plan was devised to build a transmitting tower in several sections, with each section isolated from the others by insulators, eliminating the parasitic electrical currents induced in the steel structure by the antenna's radiating element. Austin had previously worked on sectionalized high-tension power line towers and held a patent on that design.

Some radio stations had already built towers which were insulated from the ground, but WHK's design was the first to use insulators in the tower itself, dividing it into multiple isolated sections. In addition to the structural insulators, the tower included special ladders with "jack knife" sections at the insulated joints; during transmitter operation, the ladder sections were kept open to preserve the electrical isolation, but could be closed to allow workers to climb the tower for maintenance. During initial testing, the 1,000 watt WHK signal could be heard in New Zealand whereas the previous transmitter, with the same power level, was not even audible throughout all of Cleveland. Austin was granted U.S patent 1,968,868 for this tower design.

Tower lighting was provided by gas carried through copper pipes which transitioned to non-conductive porcelain tubes at the tower joints. A 1932 article in Radio Engineering magazine described the use of gas lighting in towers consisting of multiple electrically isolated segments as in the WHK design, stating that electrical lighting would be impractical due to the need for isolation transformers at every insulating joint. The author speculated that external floodlighting, neon tubes driven from the radiated RF energy, or wind generators might all be practical alternatives to the use of gas.

Austin transformer

Example of an Austin transformer at the base of a radio tower.

Austin is best known for inventing the Austin Ring Transformer, a type of toroidal transformer with an air gap providing a high level of radio frequency isolation between the primary and secondary windings while passing 50/60 Hz power. These are used at the bases of radio transmission towers to allow electrical power to be fed to the tower lights without interfering with the radio-frequency feed. The primary winding is mounted on the ground or on the tower's foundation, with the secondary on the energized tower structure. The windings are usually at right angles to each other and orientated so rain water can drip off the secondary without hitting the primary ring. If an optional lightning protection spark gap is installed, it is oriented with the arc path horizontal, so as to make the arc self-extinguishing.

The 1971 Austin Insulator product catalog listed 21 standard types with power ratings from 0.7 to 7.0 kVA weighing 70–340 pounds (32–154 kg), with the larger units only available on special order. Prices ranged from $300 (equivalent to $2,300 in 2023) to $800 (equivalent to $6,000 in 2023) quoted in USD, FOB Toronto. Despite having been issued a large number of patents, there are no known patents on this particular invention. Patrick Warr of Austin Insulators was quoted by Radio World:

I'm not aware that there was ever any patent. There was a story related to me by my predecessors when I first came to work here. It seems that Arthur Austin was happily making ring transformers when he was approached by Hughey and Phillips, a company based somewhere around Los Angeles that was into several types of lighting. Austin told them he wasn't interested in the West Coast market, as he had enough to do in Ohio, and told them how to make the transformer, and to 'go ahead and make it.'

High-voltage laboratories

Ohio Insulator Company high voltage lab number 1, Park & 9th Streets in Barberton, Ohio.

Between 1910 and 1968 the Ohio Insulator Company (which later changed its name to Ohio Brass) built a series of four high-voltage testing labs, with Austin being involved in the first two. The need for such a lab had been driven by the increase in voltages used for electrical transmission. Lines running at 25 kV were typical in 1891 but by the early 1920s lines were commonly running at 220 kV and it was not yet fully understood how these lines would be affected by storms, rain, fog, or snow. The high voltages necessitated physically large equipment and clearances, which meant the labs could no longer fit inside buildings and had to be built outdoors.

The first lab was built in 1910 in building 3 of Ohio Insulator's Park Street plant in Barberton. It included Tesla coils running at 10 to 70 kHz capable of generating at least 630 kV, insulator strings, unshielded high-voltage conductors, oil tanks, and spark gaps of both needle and spherical design.

In 1926, Austin built an outdoor electrical testing laboratory on the grounds of the Barber estate. In operation until 1933, this was the second of the four high-voltage labs established by Ohio Brass. It has been described as, "a juxtaposition of Victorian elegance and high-tech equipment". Equipment included four iron-core, 60 Hz transformers manufactured by Allis-Chalmers, rated at 2.2 kV input, 600 kV output. By over-exciting the transformers, Austin was able to increase the output rating to 750 kV and produced up to 900 kV in tests. R. P. Cronin of the Sandusky Register wrote that these were connected in series and were "three of the largest transformers in the world". A capacitor and synchronous switch was used to produce a transient overvoltage and a spark across a sphere gap which could be applied to objects being studied. A 1933 newspaper report wrote about the lab:

A weird place, filled with cage-like structural towers, and dominated by three mammoth transformers. From an insulated ball suspended in the air, at Austin's will 30-foot flashes of lightning leap to the ground with a crack like a rifle shot.

The space available on the Barber estate was outgrown by 1933 and in 1934 the third lab was built by Ohio Brass adjacent to their factory. Two of the transformers from the second lab were relocated to the third and a new 3000 kV impulse generator was built. Improvements made to the lab around 1960 included a new 4000 kV impulse generator. In 1968 the fourth lab, which included a 5000 kV impulse generator, was built in Wadsworth, Ohio; as of 2024 it operates as Hubbell's Frank B. Black Research Center.

Effects of lightning on aircraft

Austin used his lab to experiment with the effects of lightning on aircraft, both airplanes and lighter-than-air airships from the Goodyear Zeppelin Corporation with his research leading to methods of protecting aircraft from these strikes. Austin's interest in this area stemmed from a 1929 Transcontinental Air Transport crash. In 1930 Popular Mechanics described the lab as "the most powerful outdoor high-voltage laboratory in the world". The article observed that aircraft lightning strikes had not previously been a major problem because there were few planes and most would stay on the ground during thunderstorms but the increasing popularity of air travel would make lightning a greater hazard.

Preliminary experiments at the Barber estate lab were done on scale models of airplanes. The models were hit by artificial lightning strikes measuring millions of volts and hundreds of thousands of amps. These experiments showed that lighting would typically enter and leave the plane at projecting points on the structure; the two points might be the opposite wingtips, the propeller and the tail skid, or other pairs. In one experiment, the pitot tube was struck. The hot engine exhaust gas did not appear to attract strikes, contrary to speculation that it would.

Later tests used a full-sized Barling NB-3, a monoplane with a fabric-covered all-metal frame which had been provided to Austin by Popular Mechanics for testing. The plane was subjected to repeated lightning strikes while on the ground. Additional tests on the plane's LeBlond 60 engine showed that it would continue to run at idle speed after being struck. LIghtning strikes on the tip of the rudder resulted in small holes burned through the fabric covering where it contacted the duralumin frame. Austin's experiments showed bare sheet metal was undamaged by lighting strikes, and only minor damage was caused when the metal was covered by fabric. As of 1930 when these findings were published by Popular Mechanics, additional experiments were planned to investigate the effect of lightning on fuel tanks, the engine crankcase, flight instruments, and control cables.

Austin Insulator Company

In 1933, Austin started the A. O. Austin Insulator Company. After Austin's death in 1964, the company passed through a number of ownership changes, being at various times part of Decca Navigator Company (a division of Decca Records) and Litton Marine. The purchase by Decca in 1971 was accompanied by a move to the Decca Radar plant in Toronto, Canada. Decca had previously been a customer and relied on the specialized insulators which Austin provided; to ensure the continued availability of these components, Decca bought the company.

After some additional changes of ownership, the Austin company was bought by Patrick Warr, who had been a Decca employee in the 1960s. As of 2024, Warr is running it as an independent company known as Austin Insulators Inc. The company's main products are high-voltage insulators and transformers mostly used by the radio transmission industry. Insulator strings of the "safety core" type with mechanical ratings up to 1,000,000 pounds (450,000 kg) sre available.

Further reading

• Historical records at the Barberton Public Library.
• "Ohio Brass Builds a City: 1888-1990". Richland County History. Retrieved March 16, 2024.