William Fairbairn - the doyen of Manchester engineers

 William Fairbairn was a Scot, born in Kelso in 1789.

At the age of sixteen, he was apprenticed to Percy Main Colliery, near Newcastle-on-Tyne. In 1811, he moved to London, where he worked for Rennie and Penn.

In 1817, he launched a mill-machinery business in Manchester with a former shop-mate, James Lillie. The business was successful and in the 1830s he expanded into locomotive building. In 1836, fearing that London yards were getting all the work for iron steam ships, he borrowed heavily to set up the Millwall Yard. This survived until 1847 when it was taken over by IK Brunel and John Scott Russell where Brunel built his famous but financially unsuccessful Great Eastern.

Fairbairn had long been interested in education for working men and championed the Mechanics Institute movement; he had been party to setting up the Manchester Institute in 1824. He was frustrated by the lack of national co-ordination; there were eventually some 1,200 such institutes. In 1835 he decided that a magazine would help drawn the movement together and launched The Workshop with Naysmith who, whilst talented and a good communicator, did not have feel for the working man.

The magazine failed and this drew Fairbairn to the self educated Joseph Whitworth and the two became close friends and collaborators, both becoming part of the Manchester Lit & Phil. Fairbairn would become president from 1855-1860.

Henry Maudslay would become, in the eyes of William Fairburn, 'one of the six engineers who completely dominated the profession between 1790 and 1830, the year before he died. The other five were John Rennie, Thomas Telford, James Watt, Joseph Bramah and Isambard Kingdom Brunel. I write of Maudslay in the context of London machine tool makers.

At this time the Institute of Mechanical Engineers was a thing of the future and William was a member of the Institution of Civil Engineers and indeed some of the work for which he is renowned is what we would now know as civil engineering. Fairbairn worked with Robert Stephenson on the Britannia and bridge over the Menai Strait and the nearby Conway bridge. He went on to work on cotton mills and then steam engines. He made a huge contribution to the design and construction of Salts Mill, which is widely regarded as his mill-building masterwork

William Fairbairn was much concerned with the lot of the working man, his eduction and his safety in the workplace. William served as President of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers in 1854.

Further reading

https://rchs.org.uk/product/william-fairbairn-the-experimental-engineer/