measure the power absorption, and also the volt-drop V2 down an
induction less resistance R in series with it, and also the volt-drop V3
down the two together. The power absorption is then given by the
expression (V32−V12−V22)/2R. For methods of employing the
heating power of a current to construct a wattmeter see a paper
by J. T. Irwin on “Hot-wire Wattmeters,” Jour. Inst. Elec. Eng.
(1907), 39, 617.
For the details of these and many other methods of employing wattmeters to measure the power absorption in single and polyphase circuits the reader is referred to the following works: J. A. Fleming, Handbook for the Electrical Laboratory and Testing Room (1903); Id., The Alternate Current Transformer in Theory and Practice (1905); G. Aspinall Parr, Electrical Engineering Measuring Instruments (1903); A. Gray, Absolute Measurements in Electricity and Magnetism (1900); E. Wilson, “The Kelvin Quadrant Electrometer as a Wattmeter,” Proc. Roy. Soc. (1898), 62, 356, J. Swinburne, “The Electrometer as a Wattmeter,” Phil. Mag. (June 1891); W. E. Ayrton and W. E. Sumpner, “The Measurement of the Power given by an Electric Current to any Circuit,” Proc. Roy. Soc. (1891), 49, 424; Id., “Alternate Current and Potential Difference Analogies in the Method of Measuring Power,” Phil. Mag. (August 1891); W. E. Ayrton, “Electrometer Methods of Measuring Alternating Current Power,” “Journ. Inst. Elec. Eng. (1888), 17, 164; T. H. Blakesley, “Further Contributions to Dynamometry or the Measurement of Power,” Phil. Mag. (April 1891); G. L. Addenbrooke, “The Electrostatic Wattmeter and its Calibration and Adaptation for Polyphase Measurements,” Electrician (1903), 51, 811; W. E. Sumpner, “New Iron-cored Instruments for Alternate Current Working,” Jour. Inst. Elec. Eng., 36, 421 (1906). (J. A. F.)
WATTS, ALARIC ALEXANDER (1797–1864), English journalist and poet, was the son of John Mosley Watts and grandson of William Watts, a Leicester physician of repute. After leaving school he made his living for a short time by teaching, and in 1818 joined the staff of the New Monthly Magazine in London, becoming about the same time a contributor to the Literary Gazette. In 1822 he was made editor of the Leeds Intelligencer, in the columns of which he was one of the first to advocate measures for protecting workers in factories against accidents from machinery. In 1823 he published his first volume of verse, Poetical Sketches, and in 1824 he became the editor of the Literary Souvenir, of which he also became the proprietor two years later, and in the conduct of which he secured the co-operation of some of the most famous men of letters of the period. In 1825 he went to Manchester as editor of the Manchester Courier, a position which he resigned a year later; in 1827 he assisted in founding the Standard, of which the first editor was Stanley Lees Giffard; and in 1833 he started the United Service Gazette, which he edited for several years. Watts was also interested in a number of provincial Conservative newspapers which were not financially successful, and he became bankrupt in 1850, but was awarded a civil service pension by Lord Aberdeen in 1854. In 1856 he edited the first edition of Men of the Time. Watts died in London on the 5th of April 1864. In 1867 a collection of his poems was published in a volume entitled The Laurel and the Lyre.
See A. A. Watts, Alaric Watts (2 vols., London, 1884).
WATTS, GEORGE FREDERICK (1817–1904), English painter and sculptor, was born in London on the 23rd of February 1817. While hardly more than a boy he was permitted to enter the schools of the Royal Academy; but his attendance was short-lived, and his further art education was confined to personal experiment and endeavour, guided and corrected by a constant appeal to the standard of ancient Greek sculpture. There are portraits of himself, painted in 1834; of Mr James Weale, about 1835; of his father, “Little Miss Hopkins,” and Mr Richard Jarvis, painted in 1836; and in 1837 he was already far enough advanced to be an exhibitor at the Academy with a picture of “The Wounded Heron” and two portraits. His first exhibited figure-subject, “Cavaliers,” appeared on the Academy walls in 1839, and was followed in 1840 by “Isabella e Lorenzo,” in 1841 by “How should I your true love know?” and in 1842 by a scene from Cymbeline and a portrait of Mrs Ionides. The Royal Commission appointed for the decoration of the new Houses of Parliament offered prizes in 1842 to those artists whose cartoons for frescoes should be adjudged best adapted to its object, and at the exhibition in Westminster Hall next year Watts secured a prize of £300 for a design of “Caractacus led in triumph through the streets of Rome.” This enabled him to visit Italy in 1844, and he remained there during the greater portion of the three following years, for the most part in Florence, where he enjoyed the patronage and personal friendship of Lord Holland, the British ambassador. For him he painted a portrait of Lady Holland, exhibited in 1848, and in his Villa Careggi, near the city, a fresco, after making some experimental studies in that medium, fragments of which are now in the Victoria and Albert Museum. To Lord Holland’s encouragement, also, it was chiefly due that in 1846 the artist took part in another competition, the third organized by the Royal Commissioners, who on this occasion announced a further list of prizes for works in oil. Watts sent in a cartoon depicting “Alfred inciting his subjects to prevent the landing of the Danes, or the first naval victory of the English,” which, after obtaining a first-class prize of £500 at the exhibition in Westminster Hall, was purchased by the government, and hangs in one of the committee rooms of the House of Commons. It led, moreover, to a commission for the fresco of “St George overcomes the Dragon,” which, begun in 1848 and finished in 1853, forms part of the decorations of the Hall of the Poets in the Houses of Parliament. He next proposed to adorn gratuitously the interior of the Great Hall of Euston railway station with a series of frescoes illustrating “The Progress of the Cosmos,” but the offer was refused. A similar proposition made shortly afterwards to the Benchers of Lincoln’s Inn was received in a less commercial spirit, and was followed by the execution of the fresco, “Justice: a Hemicycle of Lawgivers,” on the north side of their hall.
While this large undertaking was still in progress. Watts was working steadily at pictures and portraits. In 1849 the first two of the great allegorical compositions which form the most characteristic of the artist’s productions were exhibited—“Life’s Illusions,” an elaborate presentment of the vanity of human desires, and “The people that sat in darkness,” turning eagerly towards the growing dawn. In 1850 he first gave public expression to his intense longing to improve the condition of humanity in the picture of “The Good Samaritan” bending over the wounded traveller, this, as recorded in the catalogue of the Royal Academy, was “painted as an expression of the artist’s admiration and respect for the noble philanthropy of Thomas Wright, of Manchester,” and to that city he presented the work. In 1856 Watts paid a visit to Lord Holland at Paris, where he was then ambassador, and through him made the acquaintance and painted the portraits of Thiers, Prince Jerome Bonaparte and other famous Frenchmen; while other celebrities who sat to him during these years were Guizot (1848), Colonel Rawlinson, C.B., Sir Henry Taylor and Thomas Wright (1851), Lord John Russell (1852), Tennyson (1856, and again in 1859), John Lothrop Motley the historian (1859), the duke of Argyll (1860), Lord Lawrence and Lord Lyndhurst (1862), Lord Wensleydale (1864), Mr Gladstone (1858 and 1865), Sir William Bowman and Swinburne (1865), Panizzi (1866) and Dean Stanley and Dr Joachim in 1867. Notable pictures of the same period are “Sir Galahad” (1862), “Ariadne in Naxos” (1863), “Time and Oblivion” (1864), originally designed for sculpture to be carried out “in divers materials after the manner of Pheidias,” and “Thetis” (1866).
In spite of these and many other evidences of his importance, it was not until 1867 that Watts was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy, but the council then conferred upon him the rare distinction of promoting him, in the course of the same year, to full Academicianship. Thenceforward he continued to exhibit each year, with a few exceptions, at the Academy, even after his retirement in 1896, and he was also a frequent contributor to the Grosvenor Gallery, and subsequently to the New Gallery, at which last a special exhibition of his works was held in the winter of 1896–1897. Though he travelled abroad to some extent, going to Asia Minor in 1857 with the expedition sent to investigate the ruins of Halicarnassus, and visiting in later years Italy, Greece and Egypt, the greater part of his life was passed in the laborious seclusion of his studio either at Little Holland House, Melbury Road, Kensington, where he settled in 1859, or in the
