Abstract
THIS celebrated engineer died on the 17th instant at Hythe, at the age of eighty-three years. Although he won his fame mainly as an engineer, yet his services to science were of considerable importance. Mr. Vignoles was descended from an ancient French family which had taken refuge in England after the repeal of the Edict of Nantes. His father, Capt. Vignoles, was an officer in the 43rd Regiment of the Line, and his mother was a daughter of Dr. Charles Hutton, the celebrated mathematician and professor at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich. When young Vignoles was only twelve months old, his father lost his life at the storming of Pointe-à-Pierre, Guadaloupe, when Sir Charles Grey, the commander of the British forces, gave the former a commission in the army. Thus his career has been an unprecedentedly long one. His grandfather, Dr. Hutton, undertook his education, and the pupil certainly turned out a credit to his teacher. For a short time before the conclusion of the great war which ended in 1815, Vignoles served under the Duke of Wellington on the Continent, and after visiting America about 1822, he returned to England and threw himself enthusiastically into the engineering profession. The railway movement was just then gathering strength, and Vignoles was associated with some of the earliest efforts to establish lines in this country. After the Liverpool and Manchester Railway Bill was thrown out of Parliament in 1824, he was, in 1825, selected by Messrs. Rennie to take charge of the new surveys which the Liverpool Committee ordered. From this time forward Vignoles was ever in the van of the railway movement, and had the foresight to predict, amid some incredulity and ridicule, to what gigantic results it would lead. In 1826 he was employed by Messrs. Rennie to make surveys for a line from Nine Elms, Vauxhall, Dorking and Shoreham, to Brighton; and in 1834 he escorted M. Thiers over the railways which had been built under his superintendence. The great French Minister's dictum was, “I do not think railways are suited for France.” In England, in Ireland, on the Continent, and in America, Mr. Vignoles took a prominent part in the carrying out of great railway and other engineering works. Probably one of his greatest works was the magnificent suspension bridge over the Dnieper at Kieff, commenced in 1848 and finished in 1853, at a cost of 432,000l. A fine model of this is now in the Crystal Palace.
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Charles Blacker Vignoles, F.R.S. . Nature 13, 73 (1875). https://doi.org/10.1038/013073a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/013073a0