William Fairbairn

Sir William Fairbairn ( born February 19, 1789 in Kelso, † August 18 1874 in Moor Park, Surrey ) was a Scottish engineer.

Life and work

Born as the son of a farmer, pointed Fairbairn early mechanical aptitude and did an apprenticeship as a millwright in Newcastle, where he became friends with the young George Stephenson. In 1813 he moved to Manchester to work for Adam Parkinson and Thomas Hewes. In 1817 he founded a company for refiners with James Lillie.

Fairbairn got his life and entered as 1830, the Institution of Civil Engineers at. The early 1830s he and Eaton Hodgkinson began the search for the optimum cross-section of iron girders. So it was that Robert Stephenson, the son of his childhood friend George Fairbairn and Hodgkinson retained as a consultant when he created the new tube design for the Britannia Bridge was conceived in the 1840s that was to connect Anglesey with mainland Britain.

After the " Fairbairnschen system " the Hanoverian cotton spinning and weaving was built in 1853 - and William Fairbairn gave this also still the same design for the factory building.

As the cotton industry experienced a cyclical decline, Fairbairn is specialized in the manufacture of steam boilers for locomotives and shipbuilding. Fairbairn drew on his experience with the new tube bridges to promote the construction of ships with an iron hull. As he understood a ship as a floating tubular spar, he criticized the then-existing design standards that were dictated by Lloyd 's of London and proved his ideas in his shipyard at Millwall to the ship Lord Dundas.

Fairbairn developed the Lancashire boiler in 1844. In 1861 he conducted at the request of the British Parliament, together with Hodgkinson a study of metal fatigue by by letting repeatedly fall on a wrought-iron cylinder, a 3 -ton weight. This was 3 million times before the metal broke and showed that a static load of 12 tons for this effect was necessary.

Awards

From 1855 to 1860 he was president of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society. In 1850 he was elected as a member ( "Fellow" ) to the Royal Society, in 1860, the Royal Medal awarded him. In 1869 he was a baronet. In Manchester Town Hall is a statue of him.

Works

• An Account of the Construction of the Britannia and Conway Tubular Bridges, (1849 )
• Experiment to deterministic mine 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, p 311
• Treatise on Iron Shipbuilding, (1865 )
• The Life of Sir William Fairbairn, Bart., (Ed. W. Pole, 1877)