A pioneer from North Yorkshire, who brought the first electric street lighting to London and developed the military searchlight, has been honoured.

Colonel Rookes Evelyn Bell Crompton, who died in 1940, aged 95, at his home near Ripon, has been awarded the posthumous accolade of an English Heritage Blue Plaque.

Insitution of Electrical Engineers president, Dr Malcolm Kennedy, unveiled the plaque at 48 Kensington Court, London W8, where Crompton's Kensington Court Lighting Company began producing one of the capital's first practical electricity supply schemes in 1887. It was also Crompton's London home for almost 50 years.

Crompton, who was the first major British manufacturer of electricity generators and whose workshops produced one of the first domestic electric cookers, championed the use of electricity in its early day taking portable generators to Henley Regatta and Alexandra Palace to wow the public with spectacular electric demonstrations.

His manufacturing company, Crompton and Co, kept his name until the 1960s when it was taken over by Hawker Siddley, whose splinter company Brush are market leaders in generator manufacturing today.

In London, his street lighting installations included those for Kings Cross Station and the Law Courts.

He pioneered linking a chain of lamps to just one generator where previously each lamp had needed a generator of its own. Abroad, his ambitious lighting system for the Vienna Opera House covered a wider area than had ever been attempted before. People flocked to see the new "electric gas" of Vienna's first electric street lamps.

Leading the Corps of Electrical Engineer RE Volunteers in the Boer War, he used his arc lamp design to develop the military searchlight.

Crompton was born in Thirsk and educated at Harrow. He showed an early interest in engineering, spending his summer holidays making full-time steam engines.

During World War One he advised on the design and production of the military tank or "landship".