Engineer, born in Kelso, Scottish Borders, SE Scotland, UK. He worked as a millwright in Manchester before opening a shipbuilding yard in London, pioneering the use of wrought iron for hulls. For Stephenson's bridges over the Menai Strait and at Conway, he designed the rectangular tubes ultimately adopted, and hydraulic rivetting machines that were partly used for their construction. He aided Joule and Lord Kelvin in 1851 in their investigations, and guided the experiments of the government committee (18615) on the use of iron for defensive purposes.
Sir William Fairbairn, 1st Baronet (February 19, 1789 - August 18, 1874) was a Scottish engineer.
Born in Kelso to a local farmer, Fairbairn showed an early mechanical aptitude and served as an apprentice mill-wright in Newcastle upon Tyne where he befriended the young George Stephenson.
Fairbairn was a life-long learner and joined the Institution of Civil Engineers in 1830. Thus, in the 1840s, when Robert Stephenson, the son of his youthful friend George, conceived the novel tubular design for the Britannia Bridge, connecting Anglesey to mainland Britain, he retained both Fairbairn and Hodgkinson as consultants.
When the cotton industry fell into recession, Fairbairn diversified into the manufacture of boilers for locomotives and into shipbuilding. Fairbairn drew on his experience with the Britannia and Conway tubular bridges to pioneer the construction of iron-hulled ships. In 1861, at the request of the UK Parliament and again parallelling work by Hodgkinson, he conducted early research into metal fatigue, raising and lowering a 3 tonne mass onto a wrought iron cylinder 3,000,000 times before it fractured and showing that a static load of 12 tonne was needed for such an effect.
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