William Henry Barlow (10 May 1812 – 12 November 1902) was an English civil engineer of the 19th century, particularly associated with railway engineering projects. Barlow was involved in many engineering enterprises. He was engineer for the Midland Railway on its London extension and designed the company's London terminus at St Pancras.
With John Hawkshaw, he completed Isambard Kingdom Brunel's Clifton Suspension Bridge. Following the Tay Bridge disaster he sat on the commission which investigated the causes and designed the replacement Tay Bridge. Barlow was also an inventor and experimenter, patenting a design for a rail and carrying out investigations on the use and design of steel structures.
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Early life and education
Barlow was born on 10 May 1812 in Woolwich, Kent (now in south-east London), the son of mathematician and physicist Professor Peter Barlow, who taught at the Royal Military Academy in Woolwich. William Barlow was the younger brother of Peter William Barlow. After a private education, Barlow began to study civil engineering with his father at the age of sixteen. After a year he, went on to a pupillage at the machinery department of the Royal Navy's Woolwich Dockyard close to his family home. He then worked at the London Docks for Henry Robinson Palmer.
Barlow married Selina Crawford Caffin in May 1842 at Charlton, Kent. The couple had four sons and two daughters. Their son Crawford Barlow became a civil engineer and was in practice with his father.
Career
From 1832 he spent six years working as an engineer in Constantinople, Ottoman Empire, helping build an ordnance factory on behalf of machine tool manufacturers Maudslay, Sons & Field. He also produced a report for the Turkish government on lighthouses in the Bosphorus, which led to his first two scientific papers. For his services to the Ottoman government he was awarded the Order of Nishan Iftikhar (Order of Glory).
Barlow returned to Britain in 1838 to take up a post as assistant engineer on the Manchester and Birmingham Railway working for George W. Buck. In 1842, he joined the Midland Counties Railway as resident engineer for the section between Rugby and Derby. When the Midland Counties Railway became part of the Midland Railway in 1844, he retained the position, later becoming chief engineer of the larger railway. On 1 April 1845, Barlow was elected a member of the Institution of Civil Engineers and on 6 June 1850 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.
Whilst working on the Midland Railway's main line, Barlow established that the replacement of sleepers was a larger part of the cost of track maintenance than the replacement of rails because the sleepers decayed more quickly than the rails wore-out and needed renewal more often. To remove the cost of providing and replacing sleepers, he developed and patented his own rail design in 1849. It had a wide flanged profile which could be laid directly on to track ballast without the need for sleepers, with just periodic tie-bars to maintain the correct gauge. Known as the Barlow rail, it was widely used, especially by the Great Western Railway.
Joseph Paxton, designer of the cast iron and glass Crystal Palace for The Great Exhibition of 1851, was a director of the Midland Railway and he asked Barlow for his help in the preparation of the structural calculations for the frame of the building.
In 1857, Barlow left the Midland Railway to form his own consultant engineering practice in London, with the Midland Railway as a significant client. Following the death of Isambard Kingdom Brunel in 1859, Barlow was commissioned with John Hawkshaw to complete the Clifton Suspension Bridge, Bristol, construction of which had been stalled since 1843 due to insufficient funds to finish it. Reusing the chains from Brunel's earlier Hungerford Suspension Bridge in London, demolished in 1860, Barlow and Hawkshaw completed the bridge in 1864 with a more robust deck than Brunel had planned and other variations caused by the reuse of the existing chains. Its 702-foot (214 m) span was the longest in Britain at the time.