Art and Engineering at the Tate Modern Art Gallery

Posted on 2nd March, 2026 in News

Each year some five million visitors make the pilgrimage to the South Bank of the Thames in London to visit the world-renowned Tate Modern art gallery. They pay homage to the huge collection of modern art and have often been “blown away” by the exhibits of giant spiders, enormous suns and knee-deep layers of sunflower seeds with which famous artists have decorated the vast “turbine hall” space within the building.

Visitors readily accept the cultural significance of the artworks being housed within this five hundred foot long space, yet few question why the building is there in the first place; why the hall is so large; or indeed have any idea about what a turbine actually is and what it does. As we shall see, the space actually tells a tale of intellectual, cultural, and economic striving that is far more entrancing than any daub by Picasso or Jackson Pollock, and a story that has had a far greater impact on the way we live now.

The path that led to the construction of the turbine hall goes back to the early nineteenth century, over a hundred years before the building of what used to be the Bankside B power station, and it has its roots in the rivalry between the two great global powers of the period: Britain and France. At the time, Britain’s industry far outstripped that of its neighbour across the channel, for a large part because of its inheritance of large, easily accessible reserves of coal. It used them to power a new generation of high pressure steam engines that drove the textile mills, forges and machine shops of the industrial north. France had much less accessible coal and had to rely for the most part on water power to drive its industry. The problem was that building the traditional machines that exploit water power – water wheels -was expensive, since it involved digging new water channels and constructing huge mills that contained gigantic wooden wheels. The power they could obtain from water was also limited because mills could only be sited next to slow-moving lowland rivers. 

To overcome these problems the French government instigated a prize of six thousand francs to any engineer who could produce a cheap, efficient way of extracting power from upland streams. The answer, as the military engineers Claude Burdin and Benoit Fourneyron demonstrated, was to pipe fast-flowing water past a series of blades, rapidly rotating the shaft on which they were  mounted. They called their machines turbines, from the Latin turbo meaning a spinning top, vortex or whirlwind. These new devices were miracles of economy and efficiency; one turbine used to power a textile mill in the Black Forest, for instance, was just thirty two centimetres in diameter, yet when supplied with water from a hundred metres above, produced 120 horsepower, two thirds as much as the largest water wheel in the world, the 22 metre diameter Laxey wheel on the Isle of Man, which despite its size produced just 180 horsepower.

Fourneyron’s designs were perfected in the fast developing USA, by an engineer employed by the Lowell Manufacturing Companies, James B.  Francis (who coincidentally worked for the father of the painter James Abbott McNeill Whistler). He developed the eponymous water turbine that remains the most important to this day. From the outside a Francis turbine resembles a huge Ramshorn snail. Water is piped into the mouth and is guided around and inwards by a set of vanes, spinning a set of blades that slows the water down and removes its kinetic energy before allowing it to pour out sideways from the centre of the device. Well over 90% efficient, Francis turbines powered much of America’s developing textile industry, and went on to extract the energy in the vast majority of the word’s hydroelectric power stations. The first such station was the Edward Dean Adams power plant, which was set up to exploit the power of America’s Niagara Falls in 1895. Today hydroelectric schemes using efficient water turbines provide some 15% of the world’s electricity, the technology reaching its climax in China’s huge Three Gorges Dam project, whose Francis turbines produce a total of 13 GW of power.

Unfortunately, large cities such as London and New York were sited too far away from any mountains and lakes that could supply them with electricity. Consequently the world’s first electric power stations, which were set up in the 1880’s, had to be powered by the work-horses of the day – steam engines. The problem was that these were lumbering machines whose plunging pistons produced huge vibrations and which had to be geared up to provide the high speed rotation required by electricity generators. They were huge, inefficient and expensive and so proved uneconomic. Step forward the second hero of this article, the British engineer Charles Parsons, who realised that the way forward was to use fast-rotating turbines to extract the power from steam.

The difficulty was that unlike water, steam is compressible, so he could not simply copy a water turbine. If he passed steam through a single set of rotors it would only expand a little and it would retain much of its energy. Parsons had to come up with a design that would direct the steam through multiple sets of rotors. He experimented with inward flow turbines – the steam equivalent of Francis turbines – but eventually found that the best solution was to force steam to flow along a cylindrical vessel, and to intercept it by numerous sets of rotating fan blades – like those you can see on the front of a jet engine. And to keep the steam flowing straight down the device he interspersed the moving blades with sets of motionless “stator” blades. Gradually perfecting his machines, Parsons found that they got more and more efficient with increasing size, outperforming traditional steam engines, while being lighter and vibration-free. By the end of the century they were being used in power stations and were also employed to drive a new generation of warships and fast passenger liners such as the SS Titanic.

Over the twentieth century, steam turbines gradually got bigger and bigger and more and more efficient, capable of producing almost 2 GW of power at efficiencies of up to 40%. Nowadays power plants that incorporate steam turbines, including ones powered by coal, oil, wood, nuclear energy and the waste heat from gas turbines, produce around 80% of the world’s electricity.

And what about the Tate Modern art gallery and the turbines that used to be housed within the turbine hall? The former Bankside B power station which houses the art gallery was one of a series of coal-fired power stations built along the banks of the Thames soon after the second world war to provide power for the London conurbation. Smaller than the nearby Battersea power station, the four turbines at Bankside nevertheless still provided 300 MW of electricity. However local power stations soon became obsolete. The new high voltage electricity grid could transport electricity all around the country with little loss of power, and it proved more cost-effective to site Britain’s coal fired power stations close to their source of power, around the coal fields of South Yorkshire, Lancashire and Nottinghamshire. This culminated in the construction in the 1970’s of the gigantic Drax power station near Selby, Yorkshire, which produces some 4 GW of power. The London power stations were rendered obsolete, and since they also contributed to the dense smogs of the capital, they were shut down. They were either demolished, as was the case with Kingston power Station, which I visited as a boy and which is now the site of a new housing estate; or were repurposed as gigantic halls of culture or capitalism, as in the cases of the Bankside and Battersea power stations. Their original purpose was quickly forgotten.

So what does this story tell us about our society? I think the main notable feature is the contrast in prestige we assign to engineering and the arts. We are taught far more about individual artists, such as Whistler or Picasso, whose painting are widely celebrated, than engineering giants such as Francis and Parsons. The latter designed machines that support the comfort and convenience of billions of people worldwide, yet their names are totally unknown to the general public. In a civilisation whose very existence relies on engineering we are culpably ignorant about how it works.