William Fairbairn The Experimental Engineer

William Fairbairn (1789-1874) was one of the greatest of 19th-century engineers, yet he is strangely overlooked. This is the first definitive biography for 140 years. It chronicles Fairbairn's role in the development, in the UK and abroad, of mills, waterwheels, steam engines, boilers, iron steamships, locomotives, iron bridges, cranes and elevators, including building some 500 railway locomotives. Constructing over a thousand iron railway bridges, including the first on a main-line railway (the Liverpool & Manchester), and the research for the Britannia and Conway tubular bridges. Invention of the tubular crane, one of which was the most powerful crane of its day and another the prototype of the railway breakdown crane. Building early iron steamships, including the Iron Duke. It provides illustrations for many of today's current areas of debate, as it discusses the sources of Fairbairn's success, the extent of his influence and the reasons for the firm he founded failing within a year of his death.