Thomas Telford

Scottish engineer

• Born: August 9, 1757
• Birthplace: Westkirk, Eskdale, Dumfriesshire, Scotland
• Died: September 2, 1834
• Place of death: London, England

By building an extraordinary number of bridges, canals, harbors, roads, and waterways, Telford became one of the great engineers of his day and helped to establish the profession of civil engineering in Great Britain.

Early Life

Thomas Telford was the son of a man who died several months after his birth. Afterward, his mother was soon put out of the cottage that had been provided as part of her deceased husband’s salary and moved to a small cottage where she and her son occupied one of the two rooms. She was devoted to her son, although she did not have the means to support him. However, her brother paid the fee for Thomas to attend the parish school in Westerkirk. There the boy received some rudimentary education and made several lifelong friends.

As a very young child, Thomas helped to support himself by bird scaring, cow herding, and sheepherding. The latter took him away from home for weeks at a time. While spending long nights in the countryside, his intense love for nature and his native country grew. Before leaving the Eskdale Valley in his early twenties, he wrote a poem in its honor in which he referred to feeling “Nature’s love” and rejected the “artificial joy” of urban life.

In Telford’s day the primary education received by a boy was through an apprenticeship to a master of a craft. At the age of fourteen, his formal schooling complete, Telford was apprenticed to a stonemason who mistreated him. “Laughing Tam” was good-natured but also well able to protect himself, and after several months he left his apprenticeship rather than stay with a cruel master. A cousin came to the rescue by arranging for an apprenticeship with another stonemason. Although he worked in a country village, a large-scale program of improvement was under way there that afforded him opportunities to learn his craft well as both apprentice and journeyman mason.

Telford informally continued his education throughout this period. A woman heard of his eagerness to learn and opened her small library to him. He reveled in reading John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667, 1674) and any other available books. Poetry and prose remained the loves of his life, to which he turned after long, hard days of labor. Many of Telford’s poems were published anonymously, including one in memory of Robert Burns.

Thomas Telford was a tall, well-built man with brown, curly hair and lively, twinkling brown eyes. He was among the most sociable of men and was always quick to laugh and make others laugh with his anecdotes. Despite the ready laugh, however, little is known of this private man, who never married or shared himself freely with others.

Opportunities for work and career advancement in eighteenth century Scotland were extremely limited, so many Scots flocked to England, outposts in the British Empire, and America. After working for a year in Edinburgh, Telford joined the exodus. In January, 1782, at the age of twenty-four, with a borrowed pair of breeches and a horse that was to be delivered, he set out for London.

Life’s Work

In London, the newcomer was soon at work building Somerset House at the end of Waterloo Bridge. Forty years later, as the world-renowned resident of the Institution of Civil Engineers, he would proudly point out the masonry that he had laid with his own hands. While laying these stones, he wrote of his ambition to a friend back in Eskdale:

At present I am laying schemes [plans] of a pretty extensive kind.… My innate vanity is too apt to say when looking on the Common drudges—as well as other places—Born to command ten thousand slaves like you.

Thus, while still a stonemason, Telford already thought as a master. He formed a friendship with the best workman among his fellow workers and thought of ways for the two of them to make their fortunes. At night he read books on architecture and wrote his friend that

knowledge is my most ardent pursuit, a thousand things occur that would pass unnoticed by good, easy people who are contented with drudging on in the beaten path, but I am not contented unless I can reason every particular.

Although his original business plans fell through, Telford continued his hard work and studies and found other opportunities. At his next job, he assumed the role of supervisor.

The great patron of Telford’s early career was Sir William Pulteney, who had originally come from the stonemason’s home country. When Pulteney began a significant building program in Shrewsbury, he entrusted Thomas with much of the work. Telford was soon called “young Pulteney” by the local inhabitants and greatly enhanced his reputation by defying public opinion when he predicted the collapse of a medieval church several days before it occurred. Though Telford had only good things to say about Pulteney, this wealthy man was also extraordinarily frugal and could not have been an easy employer.

The only breach between the two men occurred in 1791, when, under the reformist influence of the French Revolution, Telford occasioned a riot in Scotland by sending a copy of Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man (1791-1792) under Pulteney’s postage frank. Telford, who subsequently had little concern for politics except as they affected his projects, lost his interest in radical political change after this unsettling experience. He joined the secret, fraternal society of the Freemasons, which provided a safe outlet for his rationalistic inclinations.

Telford’s first great project was the Ellesmere Canal , which connected the Mersey, Dee, and Severn Rivers. The aqueduct at Pont Cysyllte was an unprecedented engineering triumph that Sir Walter Scott described as a magnificent work of art. Telford’s innovative spirit is reflected in his pioneering the use of iron in the building of bridges. Although others built the first iron bridges, Telford gained public acceptance for them.

During this same period, he did a significant amount of dock, harbor, and pier building and was soon involved in building an enormous number of roads and bridges in the Highlands of Scotland. This region was suffering from the decline of the clan system and severe depopulation as sheep replaced men on the hillsides. The government was alarmed, because it feared that this great source of military recruits would soon dry up and that much of Scotland would become an economic desert. Another problem was that the sea-lanes around Scotland were so treacherous that when two ships left Newcastle on the same day, one bound for India via the English Channel and the other for Liverpool via the Scottish seas, Bombay was reached before Liverpool. Thus was born Telford’s greatest challenge: the Caledonian Canal.

This extraordinary engineering triumph had been envisioned by James Watt and John Rennie but was completed by Telford. The construction went on from 1803 to 1822 and beyond, at great cost and in the face of enormous obstacles. Regrettably, the canal was not an economic success, as it cost twice as much as predicted, the size of ships increased beyond the capacity of its locks, governmental tariff policies destroyed its economic base, and the steamship and steam railroads made it obsolete.

Telford took his first sea voyage in 1808 when he traveled to Sweden to begin work on the Gotha Canal . This remarkable canal was built between 1809 and 1833 in the most inclement weather. It was primarily the work of Count Baltzar Bogislaus von Platen, who relied heavily on Telford and who honored him with a Swedish grant of nobility that the Scot, characteristically, failed to use in England. Telford returned to Britain soon after completing the canal and devoted much of his enormous energy to building roads and bridges in northern Wales. The Menai suspension bridge was one of his greatest achievements. Another was the setting of concrete under water.

Robert Southey, the poet laureate, after taking a six-week trip with the engineer in 1819, wrote “Telford’s is a happy life, everywhere making roads, building bridges, forming canals, and creating harbours [sic].” It was a nomadic existence; Telford traveled so often and widely that he did not have a permanent residence until late in his life. Wherever he went, he enjoyed warm and friendly relationships. Part of the secret of his success was his intimate knowledge of the capabilities and habits of common workers. He had a great disdain for theoretical engineers and chose his able assistants from among his workers. He was an excellent judge of men and had a marked preference for hiring Lowland Scots. His administrative skills were excellent, as witnessed by his ability to oversee a large variety of complex, long-term projects simultaneously. His reputation for fairness, honesty, and good judgment was such that he served as the final arbiter in disputes.

Telford’s ability to deal effectively with people is evident in his maintaining support for long-term, costly projects, despite the difficulties of dealing with governmental bureaucrats, to whom he referred as “insects.” He was one of a number of men bringing a heightened respect to the emerging profession of civil engineering. Road building, which his great rival John Rennie disdained, was accepted by him as a worthy area of activity. Indeed, Telford, the “Colossus of Roads,” unlike his contemporary John McAdams, built in the Roman manner, which lasts for centuries and even millennia. His status with engineers was such that when he joined the struggling Institution of Civil Engineers in 1820 as its first president, it became the center of the profession in Great Britain. Telford was honored with membership in the Royal Society, and in 1828 a royal charter was granted to the society he headed. He raised its intellectual level by establishing the rule that all members give an annual professional paper.

Thomas Telford’s final years brought difficulties as well as honors. He was alone, having never married; in declining health; and increasingly deaf. Furthermore, the railroad mania was breeding a new group of engineers who could not understand the Scot’s lack of enthusiasm for this revolutionizing mode of transportation. Though he saw the steam engine as a practical mode of transportation, Telford believed too strongly in the principle of the open road not to have doubts about the monopolistic practice of building private railroads. Though he was associated with the building of some railroads, his loyalty to canal owners also deterred him from active participation. As a result, a railroad-obsessed generation of engineers unjustly remembered him as a reactionary opponent of the technology of the future.

Telford’s lifelong love of literature was reflected in his generous bequests to the English poet Southey, to the Scottish poet Thomas Campbell, and to the establishment of several libraries in Scotland. His beloved Institution for Civil Engineering and other friends received the rest of his worldly goods.

Significance

Thomas Telford epitomized the ideal of the self-made man who helped to create the economic infrastructure of industrial society. He considered the poverty of his birth to be an advantage as he worked his own way up from humble stonemason in rural Scotland to the greatest engineer of his day in London. His jovial public personality hid both his enormous professional ambition and the complexity of his private self.

Telford was a driven man. His contemporaries saw him as the “Colossus of Roads” who relentlessly built bridges, canals, harbors, roads, and waterways. The importance of the improved transportation and communications that he wrought cannot be exaggerated. Britons, especially the Scottish and Welsh, were brought within a single cultural and economic network.

The Menai Bridge in Wales and the Caledonian Canal in Scotland were monuments to his art and dedication as an engineer. The economic failure of the Caledonian Canal was caused by factors well beyond his control, because no one could foresee the manner in which the steamship and steam railroad would transform transportation. The engineer’s reputation suffered severely because of his lack of enthusiasm for the railroad.

Telford made a great contribution to the rise of the profession of civil engineer. He did this in a number of ways. He set an extraordinary example, in Rickman’s words, “as a soldier, always in active service,” and in the enormous volume of his work and its importance for Great Britain’s development. Finally, he lent his name to the presidency of the Institution of Civil Engineers and his considerable efforts to make the association a success.

Telford’s legacy is visible in the numerous roads and bridges that he built that are still in service, withstanding loads that were unimaginable two centuries ago, when he designed them. It is also present in the permanence of the Institution of Civil Engineers. In 1968, Telford’s special contributions were recognized when an entire industrial district was named Telford in his honor.

Bibliography

Burton, Anthony. Thomas Telford. London: Aurum Press, 1999. Comprehensive account of Telford’s life and diverse engineering achievements. Includes black-and-white illustrations.

Gibb, Alexander. The Story of Telford: The Rise of Civil Engineering. London: Alexander MacLehose, 1935. This volume provides a fairly complete, chronological record of Telford’s work. Though the diversity of his projects is hard to follow at times, the book is still an invaluable source. The list of Telford’s engineering works at the end is most helpful.

Hadfield, Charles. Thomas Telford’s Temptation: Telford and William Jessop’s Reputation. Cleobury Mortimer, Shropshire, England: M & M Baldwin, 1993. Jessop, an engineer who assisted Telford in building the Ellesmere and Caledonian canals, is hardly mentioned in Telford’s autobiography. This book examines the roles the two men played in constructing the canals and Telford’s role in writing their history.

Pearce, Rhoda M. Thomas Telford: An Illustrated Life of Thomas Telford, 1757-1834. 2d ed. Aylesbury, England: Shire, 1977. This forty-eight-page survey is worth examining.

Quartermaine, Jaime, Barrie Trinder, and Rick Turner. Thomas Telford’s Holyhead Road: The A5 in North Wales. York, England: Council for British Archaeology, 2003. Surveys the Welsh section of Telford’s London-to-Holyhead road, citing archaeological and historical information to describe his road building plan.

Rolt, L. T. C. Thomas Telford. London: Longmans, Green, 1958. Reprint. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1985. This is a short, readable, and comprehensive biography of the founder of civil engineering. Readers should begin their study with this volume, unless Telford’s autobiography is available to them.

Smiles, Samuel. Thomas Telford. Vol. 2 in Lives of the Engineers. London: John Murray, 1862. Reprint. New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1968. This Victorian biographer loved to record the history of the self-made man. Telford was a perfect subject for him, and though the book is marred by a worshipful approach and a failure to examine some of the oral history it recorded, it is still readable and of value.

Telford, Thomas. Life of Thomas Telford, Civil Engineer, Written by Himself. Edited by John Rickman. London: James and Luke G. Hansard, 1838. Telford’s longtime friend compiled this lengthy account of his labors and the beautiful companion atlas of his works. However, it offers no real insight into Telford the man. There is little published material on his private life.