Joseph Wallace
Joseph Wallace (1846-1905)
1906 Obituary [1]
JOSEPH WALLACE was born at Ceres, Fifeshire, on 27th February 1846.
He served his apprenticeship with Messrs. Douglas and Grant, of Kirkcaldy, at the time that firm took up the application of the Spencer and Inglis type of Corliss valve-gear to their stationary engines. In that service he acquired considerable experience in the erection of such engines in all parts of Scotland.
While engaged in that way near Glasgow about the year 1868, and for the sake of enlarging his experience, he entered the service of Messrs. W. and A. McOnie, manufacturers of sugar machinery, where he was soon entrusted with the charge of their light erecting and machine shops.
In 1880 he was appointed Chief Engineer by Messrs. Charles Tennant, Sons and Co., over their sugar estates in Trinidad, British West Indies. In those days these properties, some sixteen or eighteen in number, were nearly all run as separate concerns which grew their own canes, crushed them in single mills, and worked up the juice in a primitive style into the muscovado quality of sugar. But during the twenty years Mr. Wallace was in that employment the number of establishments was gradually reduced, and a process of centralizing went on so that practically only two factories are now in operation, the canes or the juice being brought into them by light railways, or pipe lines, and worked up by modern methods into yellow crystals for the London market.
In 1900 the connection with Messrs. Tennant was severed, but be continued to live in Trinidad.
While on a visit to Cuba his death occurred in Havana on 22nd April 1905, at the age of fifty-nine.
He became a Member of this Institution in 1895.