The chicken powered street lights

We don’t think much about street lights - unless something is wrong with them. They are just there when we need them.
But for Bobby Ellis it was a problem to be solved. With chickens.
Bobby was a bit eccentric who liked to tinker with electronics and was interested in emerging technologies including electricity.
Born in England on July 24, 1862, he and his brothers came to New Zealand in the 1880’s settling in the Upper Motueka Valley at a farm.
Bobby built a water powered flax mill and tried to supplement his income from the mill, including using the water race for wool scouring which failed, making mud bricks for housing, and inventing new uses for flax fibre, such as hardwearing trousers.
He did produce a high pressure turbine to provide electricity to his home.
In 1911 he bought a flour mill in Brightwater looking to harness the power of the Wairoa river to power the mill by day and provide power to nearby homes.
He had trouble getting permission to do it but by 1913 he had the infrastructure in place and was powering five streetlights along with a few homes.
His vision continued to expand and shortly he was powering a fair portion of the surrounding district.
Bobby wanted a way to turn the streetlights on at night and off in the morning. His solution was chickens.
Each night as the chickens went into their coop and hopped up on a perch which sank under their weight and triggered a switch that turned on the street lights. In the morning as the chicken left, The spring loaded perch rose and the lights switched off.
Bobby had married Kate Evans in 1889. She would have been the first woman to have an electric stove and they even had an electric piano.
They had five children, one of which Henry was killed during the First World War and another son was injured not long after. Kate died in 1917 and Bobby in 1924 donated an electric street light to the Brightwater War Memorial Committee and in 1991 one of the old street lights was put near the memorial gates.
Bobby died on March 4,1935 and is buried in St Paul’s Anglican Church cemetery.
Picture by Ben Moreland.​