----- Original Message -----
From: "Andrew Sellon" <[log in to unmask]>
To: "Jane Keskar" <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Sunday, June 07, 2009 4:43 PM
Subject: Electric Connection?
> Jane -
>
> A further somewhat tenuous link between my 'family history' interests and
> Rudyard Kipling that I discovered earlier today. (You may recall that
> recently I got in touch with you concerning the Dunstervilles and
> 'Stalkey').
>
> I was looking over some texts concerning an uncle of Robert Percy Sellon,
> a John Scudamore Sellon who was a brother of Patty Caroline Dunsterville,
> nee Sellon, when I found:
>
> "An early customer of the company [Electrical Power Storage Company]
> was Rudyard Kipling, who had E.P.S. installations at his homes in
> Rottingdean and Burwash. Electrical power in the form of a battery —
> a fizzing and fuming 'big box of tanks' with a dynamo — features in
> his 'Below the Mill Dam' of 1902 as a symbol of the modern world
> with which the Tory old guard has failed to come to terms."
> <http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=46514#n70> .
>
> John Scudamore Sellon, a metallurgist and electrical engineer, had founded
> the Electrical Power Storage Company, (commonly known as E.P.S.) in the
> 1880's, as well as manufacturing accumulators they designed and built the
> first electrically powered launch, appropriately named 'Electric', and
> tram car.
>
> It might not be too wild a surmise to think that perhaps the idea of
> lighting his homes by electricity might have come to Kipling through his
> Dunsterville friendship.
>
> Yours Aye Andrew Sellon
>
>
|