Charles Fox (engineer)

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Sir Charles Fox

Sir Charles Fox (born March 11, 1810 in Derby , Great Britain , † June 11, 1874 in Blackheath , London ) was an English civil engineer and entrepreneur . He specialized in railways, train stations and bridges and gained a great reputation for building the Crystal Palace .

Life

Fox was the youngest of four sons of Dr. Francis Fox. At first he was like his father to pursue a medical career, but at the age of 19 he went to John Ericsson to Liverpool and worked with him and John Braithwaite at the Novelty -Lokomotive, in the which he Liverpool and Manchester Railway organized race Rainhill was allowed to drive. He took a liking to driving locomotives and was hired as a train driver on the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, a position that was coveted and well paid at the time.

In 1830 he married Mary Brookhouse, the second daughter of Joseph Brookhouse, with whom he had three sons and a daughter.

One of his first inventions was a railroad switch . It was patented in 1832 and replaced the previously common slide rail.

Robert Stephenson appointed him in 1834 as one of the engineers for the construction of the London and Birmingham Railway , where he was later responsible as a resident engineer for the Watford tunnel and the incline from Camden Town to Euston station , on the trains from a revolving rope and stationary steam engines had to be pulled. For the station, he constructed the 61 m long roof of a storage hall. During this time Fox was writing a treatise on the construction of sloping bridge arches, which he was able to present to the Institute of British Architects . In 1837 Herbert Spencer , whose father had been George Spencer Fox's tutor, became his assistant engineer.

Fox, Henderson & Co.

Fox was in 1838 by Francis Bramah into by his father Joseph Bramah added based company that then as Bramah, Fox & Co. worked. After Bramah's death in 1841, he took John Henderson into the company, which then traded as Fox, Henderson & Co. and had operations in London , Smethwick , and Renfrew . The company specialized in railway equipment, wheels, bridges, roofs, cranes, boilers and track superstructures and also produced components for truss bridges and suspension bridges, about which Fox gave a lecture to the Royal Society in 1865 .

The company was responsible for the construction of many important station roofs such as those of Liverpool Tithebarn Street (1849-1850), Bradford Exchange (1850), Paddington and Birmingham New Street .

Crystal Palace

Shortly before the World Exhibition in London in 1851 , Fox and Henderson succeeded in just nine months in converting Joseph Paxton's design of a large exhibition hall made of cast iron and glass into work plans and molds and in completing the huge Crystal Palace on time. Henderson fell ill shortly before the opening ceremony and was forgotten, but Fox was knighted as a Knight Bachelor on October 23, 1851, as was Paxton and the construction supervision contractor William Cubitt for this extraordinary achievement . After the exhibition, Fox dismantled the palace and rebuilt it for the Crystal Palace Company in Sydenham , now the Crystal Palace district .

The company also continued to work in railway and bridge construction, for example on the Medway Bridge in Rochester (Kent) for the Thames and Medway Railway and a bridge over the Trent for the Great Northern Railway , on three bridges over the Thames , many bridges the Great Western Railway and a swing bridge over the Shannon in Ireland. Large cast iron hall roofs were built for the railway stations in Edinburgh , Glasgow , Perth and Carlisle . Fox also worked for the Cork and Bandon , Thames and Medway , Portadown and Dungannon, and East Kent railways .

Fox, Brunel and Robert Stephenson were enthusiastic about the idea of ​​a canal tunnel and initiated initial investigations on both sides of the English Channel .

In France, Fox, Henderson & Co. worked on sections of the Paris-Lyon and Lyon-Geneva railway lines and in Germany for the Taunus Railway . In Berlin, the company was involved in setting up the Berlin Waterworks Company , was also active in the ports of Kiel and Korsør in Denmark , was involved in the drainage of the Haarlemmermeer and was involved in the construction of the Nicholas Chain Bridge in Kiev and the Széchenyi Chain Bridge in Budapest . The orders for a harbor basin in Paris and for the Roskilde- Corsør railway line in Denmark, which were taken on under poor conditions, exceeded the company's financial limits, which ultimately went bankrupt .

Sir Charles Fox & Sons

After the collapse of his company, Charles Fox founded the engineering company Sir Charles Fox & Son in the fall of 1857 with his eldest, then 17-year-old son Douglas Fox , who therefore had to give up his intended studies at Trinity College . One of the first orders was an expert opinion on the safety of the Niagara Falls Suspension Bridge , built by John A. Roebling , the first suspension bridge for railways. The following year he was appointed consulting engineer for the Cape Town Railway & Dock Company , which was preparing to build South Africa's first railway.

After a serious accident in 1861, his second son Francis was also accepted into the engineering office, which had operated under the name Sir Charles Fox & Sons since 1865 .

Fox & Sons were hired by the Government Railways of the Colony of Queensland and recommended a narrow gauge railway for the Southern and Western Railway of Queensland , which was also executed, with them being appointed site engineer for two sections. In Canada, they supervised the construction of 640 km of railway line for the Toronto & Nipissing Railway Company . Fox thus became an expert in narrow-gauge railways . Together with George Berkley he built the first narrow-gauge railway in India .

Fox & Sons also planned the bridges and lines in Battersea for the London Brighton and South Coast Railway , London, Chatham and Dover Railway and London and South Western Railway and the lead to Victoria Station in London, including the widening of Grosvenor Bridge (Victoria Railway Bridge) over the Thames.

Fox died in his Blackheath home in 1874, aged 64, and was buried in Nunhead Cemetery .

His sons continued to run the engineering office under the name Douglas Fox & Partners . It later became known as Freeman Fox & Partners and is now active in numerous countries as Hyder Consulting .

Honors

Fox was a member of the Institution of Civil Engineers since 1838 , a founding member of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers from 1856 to 1871, and a member of the Royal Asiatic Society and the Royal Geographical Society .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ George Barnett Smith: Fox, Charles (1810–1874) in Dictionary of National Biography , 1885–1900, Volume 20
  2. ^ Charles Fox: On the Construction of Skew Arches . In: JC Loudon (ed.): The Architectural Magazine, and Journal of Improvement in Architecture, Building and Furnishing ... Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green and Longman, London 1836, pp. 251-260
  3. ^ B. Cooper: Transformation of a Valley: The Derbyshire Derwent . Heinemann, 1983 (republished: Scarthin Books, Cromford 1991)
  4. ^ Charles Fox: On the Size of Pins for connecting Flat Links in the Chains of Suspension Bridges . Royal Society, March 1865 (Proc. R. Soc. Lond. 1865 14 139-144; doi : 10.1098 / rspl.1865.0035 ).
  5. ↑ London Gazette . No. 21257, HMSO, London, October 28, 1851, p. 2812 ( PDF , accessed October 1, 2013, English).
  6. ↑ a b c d e f Hyder consulting: Footprints on a global landscape - 150 years of improving the built environment ( Memento from November 24, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 4.3 MB)
personal data
SURNAME Fox, Charles
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Fox, Sir Charles (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION English civil engineer, entrepreneur, railway engineer and designer of the Crystal Palace in 1851
DATE OF BIRTH March 11, 1810
PLACE OF BIRTH Derby
DATE OF DEATH June 11, 1874
Place of death Blackheath