This year is the 300th anniversary of the birth of a Leeds civil engineer and arguably its greatest – John Smeaton.
He was born in Austhorpe in East Leeds but his many designs of bridges, viaducts, harbours, canals and navigations not only impacted on most of the UK, but also an important structure in South Leeds was invaluable to Leeds trade. More on this later.
His father was a Leeds lawyer who sent John to be educated at the Leeds Grammar School. When he left at the age of 16, he was required to work in his father’s office.
But after two years he left and joined a firm in Holborn London to concentrate on what interested him most which was the designing and manufacturing of mathematical instruments. Amongst other things he designed a pyrometre which studies material expansion.
For his work in designing instruments, he was awarded the Copley Medal by the Royal Society. The medal was instigated by Godfrey Copley 2nd Baronet 1653-1709 who bequested £100 to be used to fund experiments that would benefit society and further scientific knowledge.
Smeaton is probably most famed for building the Eddystone Lighthouse situated on rocks off the south-western shore of Cornwall on the sea route into Plymouth. The Eddystone rocks are submerged at high tide and were responsible for many shipwrecks. His lighthouse was the third to be built on these rocks, the first was washed away in a storm and the second caught fire. It was his reputation and recognition as a mathematical instrument maker which drew the Royal Society to recommend that he be employed for the job.
His success with the lighthouse was due to his inventing marine concrete which set under water and also the design of the stones used in building the lighthouse interlocked with each other. The success of the lighthouse gave him instant fame and launched him on his career. He called himself by his own creation the term ‘Civil Engineer’ to distinguish his work on structures built to serve the public rather than a ‘Military Engineer’ and the term civil engineering is still in use today.
After being in service for 120 years a replacement Eddystone lighthouse was built in 1879 on other rocks nearby because it was thought that the rocks on which Smeaton’s lighthouse stood were unstable and about to collapse. The irony is that the very same original lighthouse rocks with the remaining stub of Smeaton`s lighthouse base are still there facing all that the Atlantic has thrown at them. Most of the top of Smeaton’s lighthouse was moved to Plymouth Hoe where it is there still.
Smeaton was a keen mathematician and physicist. He worked out that waterwheels were more efficient and powerful if water from a dam behind the wheel was dropped on it rather than the big river wheels which turned with the flow of the current underneath them.
He also worked on windmills to find which combination of sails were the most effective. Most windmills had four sails but there were some which had six and even eight. He discovered that the most efficient were mills with five sails because although the wind turns an individual sail its speed is retarded by the sail behind it acting as a buffer. However, five sails were not popular because if a sail was broken or damaged and was removed, it created an imbalance. Four sails became the norm and, according to Smeaton, were more efficient than six or eight sails. There are historical references to a five sail windmill in the Water Lane area of Holbeck but, of course, any remains of that mill have long since gone.
Water and wind power were very important before the discovery of the steam engine although Smeaton in later life did design a steam engine to pump water out from a mine in Northumberland, a mine in Cornwall and even a mine at Kronshtadt in Russia.
Almost all of his designs of very many bridges are still in use today, but perhaps the two most important are firstly, the Forth and Clyde Canal which not only links the Scottish cities of Glasgow and Edinburgh, but also provides a navigable route from the North Sea to the Atlantic, and secondly, the viaduct on the A616 (the old Great North Road) which crosses the River Trent between Newark and Muskham.
But the design which had the most impact on Leeds and South Leeds in particular was his construction of the Aire & Calder Navigation. The River Aire was navigable from where it left the Humber near Goole as far as Knottingley. But its many twists and turns made it difficult and slow for commercial traffic.
Smeaton’s navigation starts at Leeds Dock in Hunslet and is joined by another leg of the navigation from the River Calder near to Castleford which connects Wakefield. Unlike canals, there is no construction on a navigation of a hard-surface bottom but sides only which channel the flow in a straight line making it easier for boats to be towed on an adjacent constructed towpath. This was particularly important for Leeds whose prosperity relied on being able to export its manufactured items particularly woollen cloth and later its heavy metal products.
Smeaton died from a stroke at the age of 68 in 1792 and is buried in St Mary’s Parish Churchyard, Whitkirk. Inside the church there is a memorial to him financed by his daughters, which is topped with a sculpture of the Eddystone Lighthouse.
Smeaton has not been forgotten and when a new viaduct was built to carry the A61 over the River Aire and Hunslet Road in 2008, it was named in his honour, the John Smeaton Viaduct.
This post was written by Hon Alderwoman Elizabeth Nash
Photo: Barges operating on Smeaton’s Aire & Calder Navigation
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