Proby Thomas Cautley

Sir Proby Thomas Cautley KCB (born January 3, 1802 in Suffolk , † January 25, 1871 in Sydenham ) was an English engineer and paleontologist . His main work was the planning and management of the execution of the Ganges Canal in India . The 560 km long canal connects Haridwar and Kanpur , where he met the Ganges - current coincide.

Proby Cautley came at the age of 17 years during the reign of the British East India Company to India and entered 1819, the artillery of the prefecture Bengal at. In 1825 he was assistant to Captain Robert Smith, who as the responsible engineer to build the Eastern Yamuna channel initiated, which because of its location in the Doab -called fertile plain between the rivers Ganges and Yamuna also Doab Canal is called. After the canal was completed in 1831, Cautley was appointed chief engineer to oversee the canal, a position he held until 1843. In 1836 he was also appointed Superintendent General of the Northwest Indian Canals.

After the Ganges Canal was completed and opened in 1854, Cautley returned to England, where he was appointed Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath (KCB) and served on the Council of India from 1858 to 1868 . He died on January 25, 1871 in Sydenham near London .

The Ganges Canal

Bridge over the Ganges Canal

The planning and construction management for the Ganges Canal was Cautley's most important work. Some preliminary planning was done as early as the 1830s. In 1840 Cautley presented the first concrete plans for the canal, which was to serve to irrigate the area between the rivers Ganges, Hindan and Yamuna - then called Jumna . In preparation he ran and rode the area for six months and measured the future canal route with his own hands. Although he was confident that the canal was possible, he faced numerous obstacles. Mostly they were financial, but the most annoying problem was resistance from Lord Ellenborough , the then Governor General and Viceroy of India . He had the work finished as soon as it had begun because he was convinced that the project was too expensive and badly planned. Cautley stood firm and eventually convinced the British East India Company to support him. Lord Hardinge , the successor of Lord Ellenborough, supported the work of Cautley, so that the way was clear from this side for the swift continuation of the work.

There was also resistance during construction, for example from the Hindu priests of Haridwar, who believed that the holy waters of the Ganges were caught by the canal. Cautley reassured them by agreeing to the plan to leave a gap in the dam so that the Ganges could freely flow freely. The ghats (bathing places) that he had built along the river and the inauguration of the Ganges dam with celebrations in honor of Lord Ganesh , the god of all beginnings , also contributed to the calming of the situation .

The project was decided in 1841, construction began in April 1842. All materials had to be produced on site, not just the bricks and mortar, but also the kilns . The engineers faced numerous problems during construction, including the threat from the mountain streams that threatened the canal. In the vicinity of Roorkee , a steep drop had to be overcome by an aqueduct, so that the canal is 25 meters above the original river bed.

Between 1845 and 1848 Cautley had to return to England for health reasons, after his return he was appointed director of the canals in the Northwestern Provinces. When the canal opened on April 8, 1854, the main canal was 560 km long and the branches were 492 km. The canal contained the water of more than 4800 km of various tributaries and ensured the irrigation of more than 3100 km² of arable land in more than 5000 villages.

Paleontological work

Elephas ganesa from the Siwaliks

Cautley was actively involved in Dr. Hugh Falconer's fossil expeditions in the Siwaliks , and assembled a large collection of fossil mammals , including the bones of a hippopotamus and crocodile fossils , which proved the existence of a bog in the Siwaliks. He also found remains of saber-toothed tigers and Elephas ganesa - a species of elephant with tusks more than three meters long - as well as the bones of a fossil ostrich , turtle fossils and the remains of a giant crane . Cautley wrote numerous scientific articles on geology and fossil management of the Siwaliks, some of them with Hugh Falconer. The work has been published in the Proceedings of the Bengal Asiatic Society and the Geological Society of London .

Works

Cautley's literary work is a testament to his broad interests. He wrote about a six-meter-deep buried city in the Doab, about coal and lignite in the Himalayas , panning for gold in the Siwalikss and between Sutlej and Yamuna, about a new kind of snake , about mastodons of the Siwaliks and the production of tar . In 1860 he published a detailed description of the construction work on the Ganges Canal.

Honors

In 1837 he was awarded the Wollaston Medal of the Geological Society of London . One of the seven dormitories of the Indian Institute of Technology in Roorkee is named after him. His friend John Forbes Royle named the plant genus Cautleya after him .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Stone 2002, p. 18.
2. ^ Upper Ganges Canal. In: The Imperial Gazetteer of India. P. 138 , accessed December 21, 2009 (volume 12). 

literature

• Joyce Brown: A Memoir of Colonel Sir Proby Cautley, FRS, 1802-1871, Engineer and Palaeontologist . In: Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London . tape 34 , no. 2 , 1980, p. 185-225 , JSTOR : 531808 .
• Ian Stone: Canal Irrigation in British India: Perspectives on Technological Change in a Peasant Economy . In: Cambridge South Asian Studies . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and London 2002, ISBN 0-521-52663-9 ( Google Books ).