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  • Civil Engineers and Engineering in Britain, 1600–1830 *
  • George Atkinson (bio)
Civil Engineers and Engineering in Britain, 1600–1830. Edited by A. W. Skempton. Aldershot: Variorum, 1996. Pp. xxiv+338; illustrations, figures, tables, notes, index. $107.95.

On 15 March 1771, seven civil engineers met at the King’s Head Tavern, Holborn, in that part of London that lay between the City of bankers and wealthy merchants and the Westminster of politicians and placemen. In the chair sat Thomas Yeoman. Oldest of the engineers present, Yeoman, [End Page 148] after building up a reputation for the design of cotton mill machinery, had done much to improve river navigation in the Midlands and north of England. His supporter was a younger man, Robert Mylne, who came from a Scottish family of master masons and architects and was himself an architect as well as a civil engineer, having been appointed Surveyor of St. Paul’s Cathedral. At the time of the King’s Head meeting, Mylne was responsible for four harbor schemes and had designed an elegant bridge over the Thames at Blackfriars.

Mylne, like Yeoman, was a Fellow of the Royal Society. A third Fellow, also present at the 1771 meeting, was John Smeaton, formerly a mathematical instrument maker and pioneer in the science of hydraulics. He had then become a civil engineer after being chosen, on the recommendation of the Royal Society president, to build a new lighthouse in the open sea on Eddystone Rock, one of the earliest applications of a scientific approach to a civil engineering problem. Others at the King’s Head who called themselves civil engineers had reached the profession along a variety of routes. John Grundy of Spalding started as a land surveyor working in Fen drainage. John Nickall began as a millwright. Hugh Hensall and Robert Whitworth were canal engineers. John Golbourne was employed in improving river navigation. Except for Yeoman, aged sixty-three, and the youngster, Robert Mylne, aged thirty-eight, all were in late middle age and had years of field experience behind them.

The first meeting was spent agreeing on a constitution. One of the more important and lucrative activities for civil engineers was to help with the technical work—plans, specifications, etc.—required by promoters of the private Acts of Parliament under which civil engineering works were then being promoted. An early rule of the new society was that members should meet once a fortnight until “the end of the sitting of Parliament.” By the end of the decade the size of membership had reached twenty, and a major purpose of the fortnightly meetings was to receive and discuss papers of technical interest. It was a first and important step toward the founding of the Institution of Civil Engineers some thirty years later.

A key chapter in A. W. Skempton’s Civil Engineers and Engineering in Britain is devoted to a series of short biographical notes on early members of the Smeatonian Society of Civil Engineers, as the King’s Head Society later became known so that it might be distinguished from the institution. Other chapters deal in greater detail with the works of three early members of the Smeatonian Society, William Chapman, John Grundy, and architect-engineer Samuel Wyatt.

An early task of British civil engineers was the improvement of river navigation to facilitate carriage of bulk cargoes—agricultural products, timber, coal, and, as industrialization took off, manufactured goods such as the Boulton and Watt engines and ironwork for William Strutt’s cotton mills. Three chapters are devoted to improvements to river navigation, one [End Page 149] focusing on the early history of Thames navigation. Two chapters describe engineering work for the port of London, whose expansion by the use of closed docks reflected the growing importance of the city as a world trade center in the last part of the eighteenth century. Another chapter discusses the improvement of Sunderland Harbour in the north of England, important for the carriage by sea of coal, the fuel on which London then entirely depended.

The book takes the form of a collection of papers contributed by Skempton over forty-five years, mostly to the Transactions of the Newcomen Society...

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