James Brindley

English engineer

• Born: 1716
• Birthplace: Turnstead, Derbyshire, England
• Died: September 27, 1772
• Place of death: Turnhurst, Staffordshire, England

The first modern English canal engineer, Brindley designed and engineered the canal network necessary for the industrialization of the Midlands and therefore essential to eighteenth century England’s Industrial Revolution.

Early Life

James Brindley was born in a remote section of Derby, England, an area populated by small tenant farmers, transient hawkers, and squatters. Brindley’s father made an indifferent living on a small leasehold, and impoverishment seems to have been the family’s general circumstance. As the eldest, James received some instruction from his mother. Nevertheless, he remained barely literate throughout life, although there is scant evidence that this was a handicap to him. Until he was seventeen years old, Brindley worked as a laborer but displayed a keen interest in the operations of waterwheels, cog wheels, drum wheels, and related machinery, frequently making models of them.

In 1733, Brindley entered a seven-year apprenticeship to a millwright near Macclesfield, the most prominent town in his native district. Doubtless, Brindley carefully chose his craft: In the England of his day, there were no provisions for the formal training of professional engineers, and millwrights, who were obliged to design, construct, and maintain the varieties of machinery and power sources on which their livelihoods depended, afforded the most proximate practical experience. While Brindley was probably unaware of it, the route he had chosen was identical to the route other renowned early engineers—William Meikle, William Fairbairn, and John Rennie, for example—also had chosen.

In any event, thanks to the indolence of his master, Abraham Bennett, within a few years, Brindley displayed skills and ingenuity that won for him high repute throughout Derby. Brindley contrived a flint mill, which proved of great value to Josiah Wedgwood and other potters. He also drained the Clifton coal mines, improved a silk mill, and experimented with enhancing the performance of early steam engines. After nine years in his trade as an apprentice and two as a journeyman, the twenty-six-year-old Brindley launched his own business in Leek as a master wheelwright and millwright, continuing his versatile dealings with mechanical problems. He constructed drain systems for mines, improved the smelting of industrial metals, and resolved mechanical problems in the industries of nearby Cheshire and Lancashire, earning a still wider and admirable reputation as “The Schemer.”

Life’s Work

The intersection of James Brindley’s skills and the duke of Bridgewater’s entrepreneurial needs signaled the concentration of his work upon canals and his movement to national prominence. Young, well-traveled, and eccentric, the duke of Bridgewater was eager to capitalize on the coal under his Worsley estate. His problem, like that of all the hopeful mine owners and small manufacturers of the Midlands, was the region’s almost complete absence of transportation facilities. Waterways were largely unimproved; canals, such as there were, were short, inadequate for heavy traffic, and for the most part private monopolies with tolls regulated accordingly. The few roadways or highways were similarly unpromising, usable only in the fairest weather or seasons, ill-maintained, usually monopolized, and invariably prohibitively expensive. Thus, the survival, not to mention prosperity, of the Midlands’ fledgling textile, pottery, and metallurgical industries hinged upon the development of reliable, inexpensive transportation: first, to Manchester and Liverpool to the west; second, southward to London and the Thames River.

Brindley’s survey for the Duke’s Canal began in 1759. Parliament passed enabling legislation in 1760, and work began immediately from Worsley southeast across the River Irwell to a point about 5 miles west of Manchester. From there, one spur led east to the city itself; the other led westward to gain access to the River Mersey, Liverpool, and port facilities. The canal was an engineering novelty in several respects. It was the first in England to consist of navigable trenches cut in dry land, freeing transport from dependence on natural waterways. Indeed, Brindley made it a principle to avoid mixing other waters with those of the canal, except to ensure adequacy of supply. Navigation, therefore, was not subject to periodic flooding.

Despite voiced doubts and opposition from other “experts,” Brindley constructed the first canal aqueduct, a stone span of three arches across the Irwell, for the passage of canal barges. Water flowing through the aqueduct was contained by puddled clay and earthworks, another novelty. A third new feature of the canal was the construction of an embankment across treacherous land, 2,700 feet long, 112 feet broad at the base, and 17 feet high. As was true of the aqueduct, the waters were sealed in the earthen embankment by puddled layers of clay faced with sand and earth. The process of puddling, previously unknown, consisted of reducing well-tempered clay and sand to a viscous state, chopping and working it with spades, and covering the viscous material with earth, thereby completely sealing in the canal waters. Finally, instead of carting coal from the mines at Worsley to canal barges, Brindley drove the canal itself into the mines, eventually creating a network 40 miles long, allowing the coal to be loaded virtually at the coal faces where it was hewn.

Together, these innovations established the hallmarks of Brindley’s engineering: careful observation, practical good sense combined with critical reflections on experience, and great ingenuity. These qualities were brought to bear by unremitting attention to work in progress. Like all engineers of his day, indeed well into the following century, Brindley, from start to finish, lived on the job site. In what time was available, he nevertheless shuttled to other work in the district, redesigning mills and improving or repairing waterwheels, steam engines, and heavy-duty cranes.

While the Duke’s Canal was under way, the indefatigable Brindley had already surveyed a much greater work for Earl Gower and a number of other Midlands investors and entrepreneurs, a work that sought to link the Mersey with the Trent, then both with the Severn, thereby linking three of England’s four major rivers, and in the process joining the ports of Liverpool, Hull, and Bristol by inland water communication. In 1766, Wedgwood turned the first sod for the project and Brindley named it the Grand Trunk Canal, the most monumental undertaking of its kind in England. Completed in 1771, the Grand Trunk extended nearly 140 miles north and south across the west of England. The lay of the land required five major canal tunnels, the most notable of which—Harecastle Tunnel—was 1.5 miles in length, along with major aqueducts over the rivers Trent, Dove, and Dane, 160 minor aqueducts, and 109 road bridges. The western approaches to England were effectively opened to the now interconnected Midlands enterprises, and they in turn were opened to the sea. Though Brindley would build more canals, the Grand Trunk was his last great work.

The extraordinary demands of his calling seriously curtailed Brindley’s social and family life. At fifty years of age, he married the nineteen-year-old Anne Henshall, daughter of his assistant surveyor, and she bore two daughters. It is doubtful, however, if Brindley enjoyed much of his family or his small estate, Turnhurst, since he continued daily on-site direction of the Grand Trunk and subsequent canals. Moreover, the physical and mental stresses of his compulsive ways at times seriously debilitated him, however briefly. Anxiety attacks caused him simply to flee work on occasion and hide away. Yet there is abundant evidence that Brindley was enormously self-confident, at times arrogant—this, despite his inability to enter the conversational, mannered circles of his time or to enter the life of the mind fed by literature or science. His portrait, drawn late in life, reveals a full face, rising on an ample double chin, and a rather vacuous stare. It is a portrait whose merit is belied by Brindley’s enormous achievements raised on the humblest of beginnings. His death was brought on by exhaustion and exposure but was attributed to diabetes.

Significance

James Brindley’s practical genius and ingenuity were responsible for laying the foundations of English industrialization. He devised and constructed the reticulation of canals that opened the way for fuller exploitation of the coal resources upon which industry came to rely for its energy. In the process, he liberated the latent commercial and industrial potential of the Midlands and bound them, as he did three of England’s major rivers, into a coherent, reliable, relatively inexpensive network leading to both internal and external markets. There was a direct correlation between the startling increase in the number of enterprises and in the population of the Midlands and completion of Brindley’s canals.

Much less well equipped than successors such as Thomas Telford, a greater canal builder and intellectually a worthier founder of the civil engineering profession, Brindley appears all the more impressive for the deficiencies he mastered. Had he not been available to launch his pioneering work when he did, by extending to the limits his practical genius and hard-earned experience, industrialization, which is so vitally dependent upon communications, might have been delayed twenty years or more.

Bibliography

Boucher, Cyril T. G. James Brindley. Norwich, England: Goose Publications, 1968. Readily available but brief, this work’s strength lies in the attention given Brindley’s technical expertise.

Boughey, Joseph. Hadfield’s British Canals. 8th ed. Stroud, England: Alan Sutton, 1994. An updated version of a book originally written by Charles Hadfield, a noted historian of the British canal system. Provides an overview of how canal engineering emerged from the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century through current times, including information about Brindley and the duke of Bridgewater.

Clark, Ronald W. Works of Man. London: Viking Press, 1985. A handsome, sweeping, well-written and well-illustrated volume that is available in most major libraries. Clark spends only six pages on Brindley but manages to place his work in excellent perspective in the chapter “Engineering Artificial Waterways.”

Karwatka, Dennis. “James Brindley and Early Canal Construction.” Tech Directions 63, no. 6 (January, 2004): 10. A tribute to Brindley and his engineering achievements.

Maynell, Laurence. James Brindley: The Pioneer of Canals. London: Werner Laurie, 1956. This work is popularly written but undocumented, so it is not useful in assessing controversial decisions by Brindley or in resolving debates about his work. It is readily available, however, and often cited in engineering bibliographies.

Rolt, L. T. C. Thomas Telford. New York: Viking Penguin, 1959. Rolt was a distinguished professional engineer and a major engineering historian. While Brindley is not the subject of this work, Rolt does much to place him and the engineering problems and practices of Brindley’s day in perspective. Readily available in engineering and general undergraduate libraries. Well written, well documented, and authoritative.

Smiles, Samuel. Lives of the Engineers. 4 vols. London: John Murray, 1862-1865. Though old, this set is available in most major libraries and nearly all engineering libraries. For generations it was the best-documented, best-written history of major engineers. Volume 1, containing a full “Life of James Brindley,” is rewarding, if not technically detailed, critical, or capable of the fresher perspectives that later scholarship makes available.