Electrifying New Zealand, Russia and India: The three lives of engineer Allan Monkhouse

Allan Monkhouse, the pioneering engineer, began his career whilst growing up in the bush servicing one of the earliest New Zealand generators. He went on to work in Russia under the Tsars, and then through the Russian revolution, standing in the street beside Lenin in 1917 as he announced his programme, surviving a death sentence and escaping through Siberia. When most people would have retired, he was called to India, and convinced Prime Minister Nehru to back, against opposition, first his finding that India’s water power could be increased twelve-fold, and then his claim that the micro-generator he had designed could bring electricity across the Himalayas. After apparent rejection, he installed the first thirty. In 2014 an estimated 105,000 villages are served by such micro-generators across the width of the Himalayas.