Edmund Morel (engineer)

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Edmund Morel

Edmund Morel (born November 17, 1840 in London ; died November 5, 1871 in Yokohama ) was a British railway engineer . He has worked in several countries including New Zealand , Australia and Japan . The Japanese government appointed him as a foreign contractor to accompany and supervise the construction of the country's first railway line. He had a significant influence on the development of rail transport in Japan at the beginning of the Meiji period .

biography

Morel was the son of a wine merchant and grew up in Notting Hill, London . He studied civil engineering at King's College London , but did not graduate there. The reason for this were lung diseases, which forced him to numerous absences and which accompanied him throughout his life. Since the bad London air was detrimental to his health, he emigrated in 1862. Until 1863 he was involved in several port, road and rail construction in Australia , the next two years in New Zealand . In 1865 he married Harriet Wynder, in the same year he was accepted into the Institution of Civil Engineers . In 1867 he worked on the island of Labuan in the British colony of North Borneo as chief engineer of a coal mine and a mine railway. In 1869 he was back in Australia.

At the beginning of 1870 he received news that the Japanese government had appointed him chief engineer of the first railway line between Tokyo and Yokohama on the recommendation of the British ambassador Harry Smith Parkes . Two weeks after arriving in Yokohama, Morel began surveying the route and monitoring the earthworks on April 25, 1870. He determined Shimbashi in Tokyo and Sakuragichō in Yokohama as endpoints . Whether it was he who set the Cape gauge of 1067 mm as the Japanese standard gauge cannot be said with certainty. It is possible, especially since he had previously built tracks in New Zealand with the same gauge, which seemed suitable for a similarly mountainous country like Japan.

Morel trained the Japanese in all areas of railway construction. In bad weather, he invited the foremen to his home to continue teaching them there. The locomotives and rails had to be imported from Great Britain. The same was planned for railway sleepers , which were also to be made of iron. British experts had assumed that wooden sleepers would quickly become unusable in a damp climate. Morel intervened and successfully pointed out that Japan had a centuries-old tradition of processing wood and that tried and tested conservation methods were available. This enabled the construction costs to be reduced considerably.

Morel's grave

The influential politicians (and later prime ministers) Itō Hirobumi and Ōkuma Shigenobu gave Morel advice on how to set up an independent Japanese railway industry. In May 1870 he proposed that the supervision of railway construction and other infrastructure projects be outsourced from the Ministry of Finance and that a specialized ministry be created instead. The new Ministry of Public Works (Kōbu-shō) began its work on October 20 of the same year. It implemented another proposal by Morel and founded an engineering school in March 1871.

Because of his reserved and respectful manner, Morel was highly regarded by the Japanese. In September 1871 he received a letter of thanks from Emperor Meiji and a reward of 1000 Ryō (then around 1000 pounds ). His health deteriorated noticeably. At the end of October he asked for a transfer to India , which the government granted him. Eventually he died of tuberculosis on November 5, 1871 . His wife died a day later. The common grave in the Yokohama Foreigners Cemetery was declared a Japanese Railway Monument in 1962 . Despite his short tenure, Morel had a lasting influence on the Japanese railway system.

Web links

Commons : Edmund Morel  - collection of images, videos and audio files

literature

  • Yoshihiko Morita: Edmund Morel, a British Engineer in Japan . In: Ian Nish (Eds.): Britain & Japan - Biographical Portraits . tape II . Curzon Press, London 1997, ISBN 1-873410-62-X , pp. 48-64 .
  • Dan Free: Early Japanese Railways 1853-1914: Engineering Triumphs That Transformed Meiji-era Japan . Turtle Publishing, Clarendon 2014, ISBN 978-4-8053-1290-2 .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Morita: Britain & Japan - Biographical Portraits. Pp. 51-52.
  2. Edmund Morel. Grace's Guide to British Industrial History, accessed July 1, 2018 .
  3. Free: Early Japanese Railways 1853-1914. Pp. 64-65.
  4. Free: Early Japanese Railways 1853-1914. Pp. 67-68.
  5. Free: Early Japanese Railways 1853-1914. P. 70.
  6. ^ Morita: Britain & Japan - Biographical Portraits. Pp. 58-59.
  7. ^ Morita: Britain & Japan - Biographical Portraits. P. 55.
  8. ^ Morita: Britain & Japan - Biographical Portraits. Pp. 60-62.