George Fosbery Lyster

George Fosbery Lyster (1875)
( Liverpool Town Crier , 1875, p. 14)

Company logo of the Mersey Docks and Harbor Board

George Fosbery Lyster (* 7. September 1821 in Mount Talbot , County Roscommon , Ireland ; † 11. May 1899 in London ) was a British port construction - engineering . He was responsible for the design of the port of Liverpool and is considered to be the inventor of special conveyor belts for grain and stone.

Life

He was the third son of the Commander and Colonel Anthony Lyster , civil engineer in Douglas (Isle of Man) . Lyster attended King William's College near Castletown on the Isle of Man , then went to the then quite famous engineer James Meadows Rendel (1799-1856) in training and made his Master of Engineering .

He began in 1846 as an assistant resident engineer and stayed for seven years until 1853 at Holyhead Harbor Works . Here, under engineer George Clarisse Dobson (1801–1874), he was jointly responsible for the maintenance and expansion of the port facilities and was involved in the construction of the breakwater there.

From 1853 to 1856 he was an engineer ( Resident Engineer ) at the port works of Guernsey ( Guernsey Harbor Works ) and in 1856 was the chief engineer in charge ( Engineer-in-Chief ) of Saint Peter Port .

When his short-term predecessor John Hartley unexpectedly fell ill, Lyster was one of 70 applicants in 1861 to the post of chief engineer in charge ( Engineer-in-Chief ) of the Mersey Docks and Harbor Board in Liverpool, which he held until 1897. He was responsible for the construction of the new Birkenhead Dock (1870) on the Wirral side of the River Mersey , the Herculaneum Dock (1863), Langton Dock and Alexandra Dock (1881), Harrington Dock (1883), Hornby Dock (1884) and of Toxteth Dock (1888) and others to the north. He also built large granaries on both banks of the Mersey.

Lysters reputation suffered damage when, during the construction of the six-story Waterloo granary (1863–1868), a calculation error resulted in the false ceilings of the floors not being strong enough. This bug was only noticed shortly before completion. Lyster was excused by the fact that he was overloaded with a rapidly increasing workload and could not control every work detail of his engineering department, but he was accused that this would not have happened under his predecessor Jesse Hartley (1780-1860). Lyster was also embroiled in a minor scandal when it became known that dock workers were doing private work for supervisors.

On November 10, 1862, Lyster applied for his patent improvements in apparatus for elevating or otherwise transmitting grain and other granular substances , and is thus considered the inventor of special conveyor belts for grain or rock. In experiments with it he achieved the first useful results in 1868. On March 3, 1863 he applied for the patent improvements in mooring buoys . During this period (1862-1864) he was just in the Devonshire Road by Alfred Waterhouse be Gisburne House in neo-Gothic style building.

He also designed the Liverpool Overhead Railway , the oldest elevated railway for electrically powered trains and the second oldest elevated railway in the world. It was inaugurated on February 4, 1893 by Cecil Georgina Alderson , wife of Temporary Prime Minister Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury .

In 1897, Lyster retired with an annual company pension of £ 2,500 . His direct successor in office was his son Anthony George Lyster .

In addition to his civilian profession, Lyster was also a Lieutenant Colonel in the Engineers and Railway Volunteer Staff Corps (volunteer corps). Lyster died on May 11, 1899 in London at the age of 77 years at a pneumonia .

Memberships

Wellington Rooms, Liverpool

• Board member of the Institution of Civil Engineers , member since December 7, 1858
• Member of the Smeatonians ( Society of Civil Engineers ) since 1866
• Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (1886)
• Member of the Wellington Rooms , one of the most exclusive clubs in Liverpool

Publications

• The corn warehouse at Liverpool and Birkenhead , 1868
• Report of George Fosbery Lyster, engineer of the Mersey Docks and Harbor Board, to the Special Committee, appointed on January 11th, 1872 , Liverpool Printing and Stationery Co., 1872
• Recent dock extensions at Liverpool, with a general description of the Mersey dock estate, the Port of Liverpool and the River Mersey , in: Minutes of proceedings , Institute of Civil Engineers, Volume 100, London 1890
• Plan of the Mersey Dock Estate , Mersey Docks and Harbor Board, 1882
• On the Physical and Engineering Features of the River Mersey and Port of Liverpool , lecture at the 66th meeting (1899) of the British Association for the Advancement of Science , in: Bibliotheca geographica , Volumes 5-6, Gesellschaft für Erdkunde zu Berlin, Verlag WHKuhl , 1899, pp. 548-568

Orders and awards

• Knight of the Belgian Order of the Leopold

literature

• George Fosbery Lyster and the development of the port of Liverpool , in: Deutsche Bauzeitung , Volume 33, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Bauwesen eV, Association of German Architects and Engineers, Verlag E. Toeche, 1899, page 285 ( excerpt )
• George Fosbery Lyster , in: Proceedings of the Institution Civil Engineers , Volume 139, 1900, pages 357-366

Web links

• Short biography

Individual evidence

1. ^ Volume Conveyors in: Encyclopædia Britannica , Issue 11, Volume 7, Column 3
2. ↑ Waterloo Warehouse, today apartments ( Memento of the original from May 7, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
3. ↑ Patents for inventions , Part 2, Patent Office, 1872, page 820 ( excerpt )
4. ↑ Chronological index of patents , Patent office, 1864, page 42 ( digitized version )
5. ↑ Richard Pollard, Nikolaus Pevsner, Joseph Sharples: Lancashire: Liverpool and the southwest , 2006, page 452 ( digitized version )
6. ↑ Newsletter # 25 , Liverpool Heritage Forum, March 5, 2007
7. ^ Railway times , Volume 71, 1897 ( excerpt )
8. ^ Garth Watson: The Smeatonians. The Society of Civil Engineers , 1989, page 71 ( digitized version )
9. ^ Fellows Directory. Biographical Index: Former RSE Fellows 1783–2002. (PDF file) Royal Society of Edinburgh, accessed January 4, 2020 .