Fairbairn, William

William Fairbairn, in full Sir William Fairbairn, 1st Baronet of Ardwick, (born February 19, 1789, Kelso, Roxburghshire [now in Scottish Borders], Scotland—died August 18, 1874, Moor Park, Surrey, England), Scottish civil engineer and inventor who did pioneering work in bridge design and in testing iron and finding new applications for it.

From 1817 to 1832 he was a millwright at Manchester, in partnership with James Lillie. In 1835 he established a shipbuilding yard at Millwall, London, where he constructed several hundred vessels. In 1844 he introduced the Lancashire boiler with twin flues. He was the first to use wrought iron for ship hulls, bridges, mill shafting, and structural beams. He also experimented with the strength of iron and the relative merits of hot and cold blast in iron manufacture. In 1845 he joined Robert Stephenson in designing two tubular railway bridges in Wales: the Britannia Bridge, spanning the Menai Strait, and the Conwy Bridge over the River Conwy. The Britannia Bridge, employing a type of box girder or plate girder that came into worldwide use, was partly riveted by hydraulic machines designed by Fairbairn.

Fairbairn became a baronet in 1869. His youngest brother, Sir Peter (1799–1861), founded in Leeds an establishment to make textile machinery and machine tools and was knighted in 1858.