Late, great engineers: John Smeaton - father of civil engineering

One of the great names in the history of engineering, John Smeaton was an eighteenth-century trailblazer. Whether you are north in Aberdeen or down in St Ives, says his entry in the Thoresby Society’s ‘They Lived in Leeds’ hall of fame, ‘you can walk along harbour piers designed by John Smeaton more than 200 years ago’. All over the country, the citation continues, you can cross bridges, navigate canals, walk fenlands that he helped to create’. But perhaps most importantly ‘at Plymouth you can stand where he stood watching anxiously through his telescope, and see his reconstructed Eddystone Lighthouse, the marvel of its age’. The first self-styled ‘civil engineer’ – he coined the term to differentiate himself from his military counterparts – was invited to demonstrate a model of his famous construction to King George II, and in 1771 founded the Society of Civil Engineers (renamed the Smeatonian Society after his death), precursor of the Institution of Civil Engineers