Fairbairn, Sir William

Fairbairn, Sir William

(born Feb. 19, 1789, Kelso, Roxburghshire, Scot.—died Aug. 18, 1874, Moor Park, Surrey, Eng.) Scottish civil engineer and inventor. In 1835 he established a shipbuilding yard in London, where he constructed several hundred vessels. He was the first to use wrought iron for ship hulls, bridges, mill shafting, and structural beams. He experimented with the strength of iron and the relative merits of hot and cold blast in iron manufacture (see blast furnace). In 1845 he and Robert Stephenson designed two tubular railway bridges in Wales; Fairbairn designed the hydraulic riveters used in constructing one of them.