MCI wants to celebrate the life of Sir William Fairbairn today. This Scottish farmer’s son became the third president of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers and the 1st Baronet of Ardwick through his noted work as a civil and structural engineer as well as shipbuilder.
Fairbairn was an inventor and industrialist extraordinaire. His noteworthy work is frankly too numerous to write about in full here, but we can give you the highlights of what was an exceptionally full life. Fairbairn’s most famous invention was the Lancashire Boiler in 1844. This boiler was an improved shell or flued boiler made to create steam to drive steam engines.
Later, in 1861, Parliament asked him to look into metal fatigue issues in boilers, because boilers were exploding with alarming regularity. When cylindrical boilers failed, they fractured along the length of the cylinder because of the high hoop stress in the wall. Following his research, Fairbairn, along with Thomas Beeley, developed a safer and longer lasting boiler than the Lancashire Boiler, the Fairbairn-Beeley boiler. Needless to say, this new design eclipsed the older boilers and there was a wholesale adoption of water-tube boilers with smaller tubes for high pressure, replacing the older fire-tube designs.
When Fairbairn wasn’t making improvements to boilers, he was investigating the collapse of textile mills. He found that the wrong specifications of iron girders were being used and the heavily loaded floors in the mills were collapsing as a result. His work on iron fatigue also brought him into contact with Robert Stephenson, who used him as one of the consultants when constructing the bridge over the Menai Strait.
He also worked in the locomotive industry and built over 400 locomotives for the Great Western Railway and the London and North Western Railway.
Fairbairn wasn’t only a man of his time, he was a man who defined his time through his work. He was at the cutting edge of the industrial revolution.
