William Fairbairn

Sir William Fairbairn, 1st Baronet (February 19, 1789 - August 18, 1874) was a Scottish engineer.

• 1789 Born at Kelso, Roxburghshire, on 19 February 1789. He was the son of Andrew Fairbairn, a farmer. After serving in the navy during the American War of Independence, his father returned to Scotland, and married the daughter of a Jedburgh tradesman, a Miss Henderson, with whom he had five children, another of whom was Peter Fairbairn (1799–1861), engineer and inventor

• Fairbairn showed an early mechanical aptitude and served as an apprentice mill-wright in Newcastle upon Tyne where he befriended the young George Stephenson.

• 1813 He moved to Manchester in 1813 to work for Adam Parkinson and Thomas Hewes.

• 16 June 1816 he married Dorothy Mar (1788/9–1882), youngest daughter of John Mar of Morpeth; they had seven sons and two daughters. His heir, Thomas Fairbairn, became a successful art administrator and patron.

• In 1817, he launched his mill-machinery business with his shopmate James Lillie as Fairbairn and Lillie Engine Makers. The firm quickly secured a good reputation, and the improvements in mill-work and water-wheels introduced by Fairbairn caused its fame to extend beyond Manchester to Scotland and even the continent of Europe. The partnership was dissolved in 1832 after fifteen years.

• 1830 Fairbairn was a life-long learner and joined the Institution of Civil Engineers in 1830.

• In the 1820s and 30s, he and Eaton Hodgkinson conducted a search for an optimal cross section for iron-beams. They designed, for example, the bridge over Water Street for the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, which opened in 1830.

• In the 1840s, when Robert Stephenson, the son of his friend George, was trying to develop a way of crossing the Menai Straits, he retained both Fairbairn and Hodgkinson as consultants. It was Fairbairn who conceived of the idea of a rectangular tube to bridge the large gap between Anglesey and North Wales. He conducted many tests on prototypes in his Millwall shipyard and at the site of the bridge, showing how such a tube should be constructed. A similar design was used at Conway, but ultimately the tube bridge proved too costly a concept for widespread use.

• When the cotton industry fell into recession, Fairbairn diversified into the manufacture of boilers for locomotives and into shipbuilding. Fairbairn drew on his experience with the construction of iron-hulled ships when designing the the Britannia Bridge and Conwy Railway Bridges. Perceiving a ship as a floating tubular beam, he criticised existing design standards dictated by Lloyds of London and proved his ideas at his Millwall shipyard with the Lord Dundas.

• Fairbairn developed the Lancashire Boiler in 1844.

• In 1861, at the request of the UK Parliament, he conducted early research into metal fatigue, raising and lowering a 3 tonne mass onto a wrought iron cylinder 3,000,000 times before it fractured and showing that a static load of 12 tonne was needed for such an effect.

• Fairbairn was also one of the first engineers to conduct systematic investigations of failures of structures, including the collapse of mills and boiler explosions. His report on the collapse of a mill at Oldham showed the poor design methods used by architects when specifying cast iron girders for supporting heavily loaded floors, for example.

• In another report, he condemned the use of trussed cast iron girders, and advised Robert Stephenson not to use the concept in a bridge then being built over the river Dee at Chester in 1846. The bridge collapsed in may 1847, killing 5 people who were passengers on the local train passing over the structure at the time. The Dee bridge disaster raised concerns about the integrity of many other railway bridges already built or about to be built on the rail network.

• 1874 He died of a severe bronchial cold on 18 August 1874 at the house of his son-in-law, a Mr Bateman of Moor Park, near Farnham in Surrey. He was survived by his wife, and was buried at Prestwick, Northumberland

See Also

• William Fairbairn by Samuel Smiles
• Obit in The Engineer of 7th June 1901.

Sources of Information

• [1] Wikipedia
• [2] DNB