engineering

William Henry Barlow

William Henry Barlow is a engineering topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand William Henry Barlow rather than just read about it. In short: William Henry Barlow (10 May 1812 – 12 November 1902) was an English civil engineer of the 19th century, particularly associated with railway engineering projects. Barlow was involved in many engineering enterprises.

Key takeaways

William Henry Barlow belongs to engineering; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect William Henry Barlow to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of William Henry Barlow from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

William Henry Barlow (10 May 1812 – 12 November 1902) was an English civil engineer of the 19th century, particularly associated with railway engineering projects. Barlow was involved in many engineering enterprises. He was engineer for the Midland Railway on its London extension and designed the company's London terminus at St Pancras. With John Hawkshaw, he completed Isambard Kingdom Brunel's Clifton Suspension Bridge. Following the Tay Bridge disaster he sat on the commission which investigated the causes and designed the replacement Tay Bridge. Barlow was also an inventor and experimenter, patenting a design for a rail and carrying out investigations on the use and design of steel structures.

Early life and education Barlow was born on 10 May 1812 in Woolwich, Kent (now in south-east London), the son of mathematician and physicist Professor Peter Barlow, who taught at the Royal Military Academy in Woolwich. William Barlow was the younger brother of Peter William Barlow. After a private education, Barlow began to study civil engineering with his father at the age of sixteen. After a year he, went on to a pupillage at the machinery department of the Royal Navy's Woolwich Dockyard close to his family home. He then worked at the London Docks for Henry Robinson Palmer. Barlow married Selina Crawford Caffin in May 1842 at Charlton, Kent. The couple had four sons and two daughters. Their son Crawford Barlow became a civil engineer and was in practice with his father.

Career From 1832 he spent six years working as an engineer in Constantinople, Ottoman Empire, helping build an ordnance factory on behalf of machine tool manufacturers Maudslay, Sons & Field. He also produced a report for the Turkish government on lighthouses in the Bosphorus, which led to his first two scientific papers. For his services to the Ottoman government he was awarded the Order of Nishan Iftikhar (Order of Glory). Barlow returned to Britain in 1838 to take up a post as assistant engineer on the Manchester and Birmingham Railway working for George W. Buck. In 1842, he joined the Midland Counties Railway as resident engineer for the section between Rugby and Derby. When the Midland Counties Railway became part of the Midland Railway in 1844, he retained the position, later becoming chief engineer of the larger railway. On 1 April 1845, Barlow was elected a member of the Institution of Civil Engineers and on 6 June 1850 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.

Whilst working on the Midland Railway's main line, Barlow established that the replacement of sleepers was a larger part of the cost of track maintenance than the replacement of rails because the sleepers decayed more quickly than the rails wore-out and needed renewal more often. To remove the cost of providing and replacing sleepers, he developed and patented his own rail design in 1849. It had a wide flanged profile which could be laid directly on to track ballast without the need for sleepers, with just periodic tie-bars to maintain the correct gauge. Known as the Barlow rail, it was widely used, especially by the Great Western Railway. Joseph Paxton, designer of the cast iron and glass Crystal Palace for The Great Exhibition of 1851, was a director of the Midland Railway and he asked Barlow for his help in the preparation of the structural calculations for the frame of the building.

In 1857, Barlow left the Midland Railway to form his own consultant engineering practice in London, with the Midland Railway as a significant client. Following the death of Isambard Kingdom Brunel in 1859, Barlow was commissioned with John Hawkshaw to complete the Clifton Suspension Bridge, Bristol, construction of which had been stalled since 1843 due to insufficient funds to finish it. Reusing the chains from Brunel's earlier Hungerford Suspension Bridge in London, demolished in 1860, Barlow and Hawkshaw completed the bridge in 1864 with a more robust deck than Brunel had planned and other variations caused by the reuse of the existing chains. Its 702-foot (214 m) span was the longest in Britain at the time. Between 1862 and 1869, Barlow was consultant engineer for the Midland Railway's southern extension from Bedford to London, including the layout of the London terminus station at St Pancras on Euston Road. To deal with the sloping site and the need to cross the Regent's Canal a short distance to the north, the platforms were constructed on a raised structure supported on cast iron columns and girders. Under this structure, storage was laid out for beer from the breweries at Burton upon Trent. With assistance from Rowland Mason Ordish, Barlow also designed the arched, cast iron station canopy which spans 240 feet (73 m) across the platforms without intermediate support – then the widest of its kind in the world. It was designed as a cost-effective and efficient means of avoiding the need for additional solid structure in the lower level. George Gilbert Scott designed the hotel in front of the train shed.

… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.

Illustrations

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with William Henry Barlow

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what William Henry Barlow claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In engineering, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to William Henry Barlow before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about William Henry Barlow ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of William Henry Barlow

In research: William Henry Barlow appears in engineering research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses William Henry Barlow in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: William Henry Barlow is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 1812 births, 1902 deaths, British fellows of the Royal Society, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for William Henry Barlow outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study William Henry Barlow in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what William Henry Barlow means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain William Henry Barlow out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is William Henry Barlow in simple terms?

Why does William Henry Barlow matter?

Because it connects several engineering ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study William Henry Barlow?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on William Henry Barlow.