James Brindley was one of the first canal-builders in England, launching the "canal era" that saw the proliferation of these man-made waterways across the country to fuel the Industrial Revolution by providing efficient transportation routes for sending raw materials to manufacturing centers and finished products back to the land of the consumer. Brindley was the first to employ tunnels and aqueducts in English canals. In all, he was responsible for the design and construction of some 365 miles of canals.
Brindley was born in 1716 in Newstead, near Buxton, in Derbyshire, England. He was the eldest child born to Susannah and James Brindley, a cottager. He almost certainly received little formal education, though stories of his illiteracy may be apocryphal, based less on hard evidence than on the fact that he performed all calculations in his head and hence left no record of his work. In fact, he had the unorthodox method of solving technical challenges by "sleeping on" the problem, often for several days, until the solution appeared to him—this technique (as well as his involvement in multiple projects simultaneously) earned him the nickname of "the Schemer."
In 1726, Brindley’s father purchased a portion of Lowe Hill Farm in Leek. There, Brindley worked as a farm laborer until 1733 when, at the age of 17, he apprenticed to Abraham Bennett, a mill- and wheelwright near Macclesfield. Upon Bennett’s death in 1742, Brindley established his own business as a millwright in Leek. He ran flint mills for Josiah Wedgwood’s pottery and also concurrently involved himself in multiple other projects: he designed and constructed an engine to drain the Clifton coal pits; he held a share in the Golden Hill colliery; and he established a partnership with his brother, John, in the Longport Pottery.
In 1758, Brindley patented a different design for thomas newcomen’s steam engine, though the actual engine itself proved a failure. That same year, Earl Gower contracted Brindley to survey a canal between the Trent and Mersey Rivers, a project that never made it off the ground. However, Gower recommended Brind-ley for another canal project, which secured Brindley’s reputation as an ingenious engineer.
On July 1, 1759, Francis Egerton, the duke of Bridgewater, hired Brindley to design and build the Worsley Canal to link his coal mines to the manufacturing center of Manchester. It took Brindley six days to survey the route, and six years to complete the 10-mile canal. Three features especially distinguished the "Duke’s Canal": a subterranean channel; the Barton aqueduct, which carried the water over the River Irwell; and the draining of the coal mines to supply water to the canal (though these last two innovations were subsequently attributed to John Gilbert, the duke’s land agent).
In 1760, a son, John Bennett, was born to Brindley. On December 8, 1765, Brindley married Anne Henshall, and together the couple had two daughters—Susannah and Anne—in addition to the son he previously sired. Brindley returned to the Trent and Mersey Canal that he had surveyed for Earl Gower but did not build due to lack of funding; by 1865, Josiah Wedgwood had realized the intelligence of sending his fragile pottery to market via waterways as opposed to by horse and cart, so he backed the project.
Called the Grand Trunk Canal, it ultimately measured 93 miles, transversing Cheshire and Staffordshire; it featured 213 bridges, 160 aqueducts, 76 locks, and five tunnels, including the famous one-and-a-half-mile Harecastle Tunnel. While the Grand Trunk Canal was in construction, Brindley worked concurrently on several other projects: he was the supervising engineer of the Staffordshire Canal as well as of the Worcestershire Canal, both constructed in 1766; and the next year, he assisted in planning for the Birmingham and the Coventry Canals.
While conducting a survey for the Caldon Canal, a branch of the Trent and Mersey connector, Brindley got caught in a rainstorm and slept in his soaked clothing, resulting in a fatal cold. He died on September 27 (or 30), 1772, at Turnhurst, in Staffordshire, England, before the completion of the Grand Trunk Canal. Brind-ley’s brother-in-law, Hugh Henshall, continued work on the canal, and it finally opened in 1777. Others of his canals were improved after his death, mostly by straightening them out to allow for more efficient transportation.
