Sir William Fairbairn

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

Early Career

Born in Kelso to a local farmer, Fairbairn showed an early mechanical aptitude and served as an apprentice mill-wright in Newcastle upon Tyne where he befriended the young George Stephenson. He moved to Manchester in 1813 to work for Adam Parkinson and Thomas Hewes. In 1817, he launched his mill-machinery business with James Lillie as Fairburn and Lillie Engine Makers.

Structural Studies

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 youthful 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.

Boilers

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.

Faibairn 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.

Investigations

Fairbairn was 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.

Fairbairn conducted some of the first serious studies of the effects of repeated loading of wrought and cast iron girders, showing that fracture could occur by crack growth from incipient defects, a problem now known as fatigue. He built large-scale testing apparatus for the studies, and was partly funded by the Board of Trade.

Honours

• President of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, (1855-1860);
• Baronet, (2 November 1869);
• A statue stands in Manchester Town Hall.

Works

• An Account of the Construction of the Britannia and Conway Tubular Bridges, (1849)
• On the Application of Cast and Wrought Iron for Building Purposes, New York, John Wiley (1854)
• Useful Information for Engineers, Longmans, London (1856)
• Experiments to determine the effect of impact, vibratory action, and long continued changes of load on wrought iron girders, (1864) Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, London vol. 154, p311
• Treatise on Iron Shipbuilding, (1865)
• The Life of Sir William Fairbairn, Bart., (ed. W. Pole, 1877)

External links

• The Lancashire boiler

This page incorporates information from Leigh Rayment's Peerage Page.

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