300th ANNIVERSARY LUNCH AND SMEATON MEDAL AWARD

Celebrating John Smeaton 1724 - 1792

John Smeaton’s career covered an extraordinarily wide range of projects, far greater than any other engineer of his time. They included lighthouses, bridges, canals, river training, fen drainage, docks and harbours, mills and steam engines. In all these fields he advanced the understanding of technical issues, moving towards improved manufacturing skills, well thought-out project management and economy of materials. Uniquely, he was also an engineering scientist of great distinction. So to sum up all this up in fifteen short minutes is an almost impossible task but here goes.

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When Smeaton was born in 1724 there wasn’t a discernible engineering profession in Britain. This was in direct contrast to Europe, particularly France, where  technical specialists, named Ingénieurs, had long been formed into bodies responsible for military, naval and infrastructure engineering. In 1747 the Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées was founded to train engineers. There was nothing like this in Britain and no formal training of any kind.

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It wasn’t that there weren’t any engineers in Britain but they were called things like millwright, artisan, mason, carpenter or surveyor and were only involved in fairly small-scale local projects. Moreover, unlike in Europe where all engineering works were paid for by the state, those in Britain were privately financed. The biggest British engineering project since Roman times, the draining of the East Anglian fens in the 17th century, was funded by the Duke of Bedford and a group of private investors and the work was carried out by Dutch engineers. In 1736 Westminster Bridge was built. It was paid for by a public lottery and built by a Swiss engineer. These were the only large-scale engineering works in this country before Smeaton embarked on the construction of the third Eddystone Lighthouse, his most famous achievement. By the time he died a fully-fledged engineering profession had come into being, for which he was in a large part responsible.  

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As you all know by now, John Smeaton was born in the parish of Whitkirk outside Leeds. He showed dazzling mechanical skills from an early age. Unlike most of his contemporaries, such as James Brindley, he came from a middle-class background and was well educated at Leeds Grammar School. His father wished him to go into the law but 1748 he set himself up as a scientific instrument maker. In 1753, at the young age of 28, he was elected to the Royal Society. However, he was already turning his attention to engineering, which he always called ‘engineery’.

He embarked on a period of self-education, studying contemporary texts on engineering, notably Belidor’s classic work, Architecture Hydraulique. He read French and was thus able to derive ideas from Belidor which he was to use throughout his career. In 1755 he went to the Netherlands to observe at first hand their sluices, locks, lock gates and mills as well as inspecting dykes and observing their construction and maintenance.

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Five months after he returned, in December 1755, the second Eddystone Lighthouse, largely made of timber, was badly damaged by fire. Robert Weston, its proprietor, immediately sought the advice of the President of the Royal Society about who could rebuild it. Weston was given Smeaton’s name and informed that he was never known to undertake anything but what he completed to the satisfaction of those who employed him but would not undertake it unless he clearly saw himself capable of performing it.

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Smeaton initially thought that the job only required the restoration of the upper part of the tower and that he would be one of a number of candidates asked to put forward proposals. However, he quickly discovered that there were no other candidates and furthermore that he was expected to build a completely new lighthouse from scratch.  He remarked wryly in his book on the lighthouse, that as Nathan said unto David, “Thou art the man.” This refers to a story in Samuel 2 when King David walked into a trap laid for him by Nathan the Prophet.

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At this point, apart from a few mills, Smeaton was virtually untried as an engineer. Thus his appointment to the Eddystone Lighthouse, by far the most difficult and dangerous construction project of the 18th century, speaks volumes about how this young man, aged only 31, was seen by his contemporaries. Robert Weston, his employer, gave him complete control over the project, which was just as well because there was a strong local movement to rebuild in timber. Smeaton insisted upon stone, writing, My ideas of what its duration and continued existence ought to be, were not confined within the boundary of an age or two; but extended themselves to look forward to a possible perpetuity. The use of stone added enormously to the difficulty of building since pre-shaped blocks of masonry, weighing up to two tons had to be shipped out and lifted into place.

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So let us remind ourselves what this inexperienced young man was up against. The Eddystone rocks lie about 12 miles south west of Plymouth Sound. They are exposed to the wind in all directions and when there are storms in the Bay of Biscay ground swells persist for days. There are several parallel reefs which slope downwards for a long way towards the west, frequently causing a massive build-up of water, hugely increasing the force and height of the waves. It was one of the most perilous sites imaginable on which to construct a lighthouse. It took eight hours to row out and you often couldn’t land when you got there. Smeaton was only able to land four times in ten trips in the summer of 1756 but nevertheless managed to survey the site. Later that year the vessel he was on couldn’t get back to Plymouth for four days and it was assumed he’d been lost at sea. His safe return was greeted with inexpressible joy.  

The Eddystone Lighthouse displayed all Smeaton’s genius. His project management was outstanding and his powers of organisation contributed very considerably to the success of the undertaking. The tower itself had many innovative features of which I am only going to mention the most famous: his use of interlocking masonry blocks. This clever design, which he found in Belidor, was first used at the Cherbourg sea lock, the floor of which used interlocking slabs which would hold together even if the mortar was washed out. Smeaton took the basic concept and applied it to the lighthouse, fitting the stones together both horizontally and vertically to form a kind of 3D jigsaw puzzle, giving exceptional strength and durability to the structure. The lighthouse was finished in 1759 and Weston wanted Smeaton’s name to be inscribed on it. Smeaton refused, saying that he had more vanity than to wish to give so palpable an instance thereof. Nevertheless, the lighthouse made his name and was to serve as a template for the construction of all deep-sea lights thereafter.  When it had to be replaced in 1879 it was because the rocks beneath were being eroded and weakened rather than by any failure in the stability of the tower.

Smeaton’s brilliant practical skills were reinforced by his scientific gifts, first demonstrated in his famous experiments on the power of wind and water to drive mills. He was awarded the Royal Society’s Copley Medal for his paper which established an empirical tradition in British engineering. He himself described his work as the art of producing the greatest degree of power, with a given quantity of water and fall, effectively the economising of energy resources. He later applied this art to the improvement of steam engines, rather an under-appreciated aspect of his genius.

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Smeaton’s first-known drawing, made when he was 17, was of an atmospheric steam engine at work close to his home. These machines, the most powerful engines on earth, were invented by Thomas Newcomen to drain coal mines to get at the deep-level seams. Such an engine consisted of pump rods at one end of a rocking beam and a piston in a cylinder at the other end. You filled the cylinder with steam and then condensed it by pouring in cold water to create a vacuum. The piston was forced down by atmospheric pressure to raise the pump rods at the other end of the beam. It was a perfectly effective engine but the constant heating up and cooling down of the cylinder made it very fuel hungry indeed. This was fine as long as the engine was draining a mine because coal was free. It was not at all fine if the engine was pumping water for another purpose, in which case its coal would have to be paid for. 

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In 1768 Smeaton built an engine for the New River Company to pump water from one reservoir up to another. As with the Eddystone, he had no practical experience and based his design on the calculations of other engineers which he found to be much exaggerated. He was disappointed in its performance and embarked on a round of visits to the North East and Cornwall to gather data from engines at work.

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He built an engine at his home in Austhorpe on which he carried out a series of about 130 tests, each time omitting one factor and measuring the effect of this on the overall performance. This is the first time that such controlled experiments had ever been carried out. His findings enabled him enormously to improve engine design and manufacture, resulting in the decrease of coal consumption and the increase of efficiency by up to 25%.

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His clear thinking and attention to detail are evident in everything he undertook but I’m only going to mention the Forth & Clyde Canal, completed in 1779. It was the first summit-level canal in Britain. It was also one of the largest works of the 18th century and good project management, as on the Eddystone, was essential. In his great report on the canal Smeaton defined for the first time the hierarchy and the job descriptions of the engineering team, introducing the new role of resident engineer. It is a pattern of organisation that has been more or less followed ever since.

Well, everyone makes mistakes, though Smeaton made amazingly few. He did, however, have one catastrophic failure – the Hexham Bridge over the River Tyne. Because all engineering works were privately funded, Smeaton was scrupulous in avoiding unnecessary expense for his clients. In this case though, he misread the ground conditions, dispensing with piles for most the piers,  and the bridge was destroyed in a flood in 1782. The only way that this could have been prevented was to cover the entire riverbed between the piers and up- and downstream with a masonry platform but he rejected this as being too expensive. He was absolutely crushed, writing to a friend,  All our honours are now in the Dust! It cannot now be said, that in the course of 30 years’ practice…not one of Smeaton’s works has failed.

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You will notice that I have been avoiding the words civil engineer, which only came into use after 1771 when Smeaton co-founded the Society of Civil Engineers, now the Smeatonian Society. In those days the phrase was used to differentiate engineers working for society from military engineers. Until the profession split in the 1840s with the founding of the Mechanicals, civil engineering covered everything necessary to make civilian society work. Smeaton gave this nascent profession a name, civil engineering, conferring upon a hitherto disparate group of practitioners an identity and a status which has lasted to this day.

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The Society provided the first forum where engineers could meet for the exchange of information at a time when there was no formal training. There was little printed practical information available in English and when Smeaton died the Society published all his reports, an act unique in the history of engineering. The reports were described as a mine of wealth for the sound principles they unfold, and the able practice they exemplify. Together with his drawings and engravings deposited in the Royal Society library, a corpus of technical literature came into being.

He was universally admired and James Watt allegedly referred to him as ‘Father Smeaton’.  He was a man of simplicity, retaining his Yorkshire accent throughout his life, and was renowned for his integrity, his modesty and his generosity towards friends, colleagues and clients. He strongly believed that ‘the abilities of the individual are a debt due to the common stock of public happiness’.

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I’m giving the final word to our late worthy brother, Professor Sir Alec Skempton, a very great engineer but also a very great engineering historian. He revered Smeaton and masterminded the first biography of him since the 19th century. Skempton wrote:

Civil engineering has to be both an art and a science, and the engineer’s responsibility is to develop both aspects to the limit of his powers in order to fulfil the clients’ requirements as safely and economically as possible. Smeaton steadfastly based his practice on this principle, to the immense benefit of his country and of his profession.