SMEATON, JOHN

(b. Austhorpe, England, 8 June 1724: d, Austhorpe, 28 October 1792)

civil engineering, applied mechanics.

One of the foremost British engineers of the eighteenth century, Smeaton also gained a reputation as a man of science and distinguished himself through experimental research on applied hydraulics. He was descended from a family of Scots, one of whom, Thomas Smeton, turned to Protestantism late in the sixteenth century and held important positions in the church and in the University of Glasgow. By the time of Smeaton’s birth, the family resided near Leeds, where his father, William, practiced law. Smeaton was encouraged to follow a legal career, and after a sound elementary education he served in his father’s office and was later sent to London for further employment and training in the courts. An early inclination toward the mechanical arts soon prevailed, however: and, with his father’s consent, he became a maker of scientific instruments, a pursuit that allowed ample scope for both his scientific interests and his mechanical ingenuity.

Early in the 1750’s Smeaton began the experiments that constituted his chief contribution to science; and during this period he also busied himself with several technical innovations, including a novel pyrometer with which he studied the expansive characteristics of various materials. The pace of industrial and commercial progress was quickening in Britain, however, and the attention of technical men was being directed increasingly toward large-scale engineering works. From 1756 to 1759 Smeaton was occupied with his best-known achievement, the rebuilding of the Eddystone lighthouse. By the end of the decade it had become evident that structural engineering and river and harbor works were more profitable than making scientific instruments. Accordingly, Smeaton established himself as a consultant in these fields; indeed, it was he who adopted the term “civil engineer” to distinguish civilian consultants and designers from the increasing number of military engineers who were being graduated from the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich. During the last thirty-five years of his life he was responsible for many engineering projects, including bridges, steam engine facilities, power stations run by wind or water, mill structures and machinery, and river and harbor improvements.

Smeaton became a fellow of the Royal Society, a member of the Royal Society Club, and an occasional guest at meetings of the Lunar Society. He also was a charter member of the first professional engineering society, the Society of Civil Engineers (not to be confused with the later Institution of Civil Engineers), founded in 1771; after his death it became known as the Smeatonian Society. Its founding reflected the growing sense of profession-alization among British civilian engineers during the eighteenth century.

In 1759 Smeaton’s engineering and scientific careers were crowned with outstanding success. In that year he completed the Eddystone lighthouse, which confirmed his reputation as an engineer, and published a paper on waterwheels and windmills, for which is received the Copley Medal of the Royal Society

In His research on waterwheels Smeaton reopened the question of the relative efficiency of undershot wheels (which operate through impulse of the water against the blades) and overshot wheels (where the water flows from above and moves the wheel by the force of its weight). Through experiments on a model wheel he showed that, contrary to common opinion, overshot wheels are twice as efficient as undershot. Beyond this empirical generalization Smeaton displayed his scientific bent by speculating on the cause greater loss of energy (“mechanic power,” as the termed it) in the undershot wheel and by concluding that it was consumed in turbulence— “nonelastic bodies [water], when acting by their impulse collision, communicate only a part of their original power; the other part being spent in changing figure in consequence of the stroke.”

Following this initial success in research on applied mechanics, Smeaton’s interests drifted toward natural philosophy and he devote two further experimental investigations to the vis viva dispute and the laws of collision. He maintained that these seemingly abstract studies were of importance in practice, inasmuch as the conclusions of natural philosophers might, if incorrect, mislead practical men to adopt unsound procedures The results he obtained, however, were more consequential in theory than in practice, for they confirmed not only the belief that mechanical effort could indeed be “lost” but also that mv² (vis viva)was a measure of “mechanic power.” Smeaton recognized that his conclusions were in opposition to those favored by the disciples of Newton, and he diplomatically specified that both mv and mv² were useful values when properly interpreted.

Smeaton’s career provides an early example the interaction of engineering and applied science. His technical interests influenced the direction of his scientific research; and he used the results of his research in his own waterwheel designs, consistently favoring breast wheels and overshot wheels and almost never using the undershot system. There is reason to believe that Smeaton’s work led other designers to foresake the long-preferred undershot wheel. Moreover, the continued economic importance of waterwheels contributed a sense of urgency to the recurrent controversy over the measure of “force”; and in these discussions Smeaton’s research and his support of the vis viva school of thought played a prominent role.

Smeaton also performed extensive tests on the experimental Newcomen engine, optimizing its design and significantly increasing its efficiency. These studies, however, never rose above the level of systematic empiricism and, moreover, were soon overshadowed by James Watt’s invention of the separate condenser. A few minor contributions to observational astronomy rounded out Smeaton’s scientific work.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. Many of Smeaton’s papers were collected and published posthumously: Reports of the Late John Smeaton, 4 vols. (London, 1812–1814). Vol. IV, The Miscellaneous Papers of John Smeaton (1814), contains the papers he contributed to the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, of which the most important are his Copley Medal paper, “An Experimental Enquiry Concerning the Natural Powers of Water and Wind to Turn Mills and Other Machines Depending on a Circular Motion,” 51 (1759–1760), 100–174: “An Experimental Examination of the Quantity and Proportion of Mechanic Power Necessary to Be Employed in Giving Different Degrees of Velocity to Heavy Bodies From a State of Rest,” 66 (1776), 450–475; and “New Fundamental Experiments Upon the Collision of Bodies,” 72 (1782), 337–354. These three papers were reprinted together as Experimental Enquiry Concerning the Natural Powers of Wind and Water (London, 1794) and are also conveniently collected in Thomas Tredgold, ed., Tracts on Hydraulics (London, 1826). P. S. Girard translated them into French as Recherches expérimentales sur l’eau et le vent (Paris, 1810). For the results of his experiments on the steam engine, see John Farey, A Treatise on the Steam Engine (London, 1827), 158 ff.

John Smeaton’s, Diary of His Journey to the Low Countries 1755. Newcomen Society for the Study of the History of Engineering and Technology, Extra Publication no.4 (London, 1938); and “Description of the Statical Hydraulic Engine, Invented and Made by the Late Mr. William Westgarth, of Colecleugh in the County of Northumberland,” in Transactions of the Royal Society of Arts,5 (1787). 185–210, throw some additional light on the engineering sources of Smeaton’s scientific interests.

II. Secondary Literature. The fullest biography of Smeaton is still Samuel Smiles, “Life of John Smeaton,” in Lives of the Engineers, 3 vols. (London, 1861–1862). II, 1–89. John Holmes, who knew Smeaton well, published A Short Narrative of the Genius, Life and Works of the Late Mr. J. Smeaton, Civil Engineer (London, 1793). For a recent biographical article, see Gerald Bowman, “John Smeaton—Consulting Engineer,” in Engineering Heritage, 2 vols. (New York, 1966), II. 8–12. None of these treats Smeaton’s scientific work adequately.

D.S.L. Cardwell has interpreted Smeaton’s research in the context of the developing relationship between power technology and thermodynamics; see “Some Factors in the Early Development of the Concepts of Power, Work and Energy.” in British Journal for the History of Science, 3 (1966–1967), 209–224; and From Watt to Clausius (Ithaca, N.Y., 1971), see index. The influence of Smeaton’s research on the controversy over the measurement of “force” may be seen in Peter Ewart, “On the Measure of Moving Force,” in Memoirs of the Literary and Philosophical Society of Manchester, 2nd ser., 2 (1813), 105–258. On his water power engineering, see Paul N, Wilson. “The Waterwheels of John Smeaton,” in Transactions. Newcomen Society for the Study of the History of Engineering and Technology, 30 (1955–1957), 25–48.

The little that is known of the Society of Civil Engineers in the eighteenth century is presented fully in T. E. Allibone, “The Club of the Royal College of Physicians, the Smeatonian Society of Civil Engineers and Their Relationship to the Royal Society Club,” in Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, 22 (1967), 186–192; S. B. Donkin, “The Society of Civil Engineers (Smeatonians),” in Transactions. Newcomen Society for the Study of the History of Engineering and Technology, 17 (1936–1937), 51–71; and Esther Clark Wright, “The Early Smeatonians,” ibid., 18 (1937–1938), 101–110.

Harold Dorn