How it began
In 1881, before finishing his engineering studies, Henri Tudor built his first accumulator at his father's house, the Irminenhof, in Rosport, Luxembourg. He connected a Gramme generator to the water wheel of a nearby mill and used lead-acid accumulators as a buffer to even out the voltage and store unused energy. With his brother Hubert and his cousin Nikolaus Schalkenbach he made his own mold for casting plates with a large surface. On July 17, 1886, he filed Luxembourg patent No. 711 for improvements to the electrodes of electric accumulators, also filed in Belgium and France.
Before it existed
Wilhelm Josef Sinsteden observed the reactions of a lead-acid cell in 1854, Gaston Plante invented the rechargeable accumulator in 1859, and Camille Alphonse Faure improved it in 1880 with pasted plates. In practical service these batteries proved unreliable: plates short-circuited and fell apart. Thomas Edison called the storage battery a mechanism for swindling the public and a commercial failure.
How it works
Tudor's plates were thick enough to be rigid and to conduct well, and were cast with slightly tapered grooves that gave a large surface. They first received a short Plante formation, and then the grooves were filled with lead oxide paste in the manner of Faure. The Plante layer gave the paste good adhesion, and the tapered grooves let paste particles shift during charging and discharging without bending the plate. Loosened particles fell into a space left below the plates instead of bridging them.
How it spread
Manufacture began at Rosport in 1885. On July 15, 1888, Adolph Muller obtained exclusive rights for Germany, central and eastern Europe and Scandinavia for a factory in Hagen, which in 1890 became Accumulatoren-Fabrik Aktiengesellschaft with Siemens and Halske and AEG, and was renamed Varta in 1962. Licenses followed in France and Belgium, a factory in Dukinfield near Manchester from 1896, and a Russian company in St. Petersburg in 1897. By July 1891 some 1,200 stationary Tudor batteries were in operation.
What changed first
The generator and buffer battery ran continuously and made the Irminenhof the first private home in Luxembourg with electric lighting. One Tudor accumulator put into service in October 1882 ran without interruption until December 1887. On April 30, 1886, Tudor signed an agreement with the town of Echternach to replace petroleum street lamps, and when the plant went on stream on October 24, 1886, Echternach became the first town in the country with electric lighting.
What lasted
Luxembourg's place inside the German customs union hampered exports from Rosport, so production moved to Florival near Wavre in Belgium in 1901 and the Rosport factory closed in 1908. Tudor suffered from serious lead poisoning from 1914 and died in Rosport on May 31, 1928. A public research center in Luxembourg carried his name from 1987, and a museum in his former house in Rosport opened on May 23, 2009.
