Bryan Donkin FRS FRAS[1] (22 March 1768 – 27 February 1855) developed the first paper making machine and created the world's first commercial canning factory.

Bryan Donkin was involved with Thomas Telford's Caledonian Canal, Marc and Isambard Brunel's Thames Tunnel, and Charles Babbage's computer.

In 1813 he and a printer, Richard Mackenzie Bacon of Norwich, obtained a patent for a "Polygonal printing machine"; this used types placed on a rotating square or hexagonal roller or "geometric prism".

By late spring 1813 they were appointing agents on the south coast to sell preserved food to outbound ships.

[2] Soon the British Admiralty were placing sizeable orders with the firm of Donkin, Hall and Gamble for meat preserved in tinned iron canisters.

In 1857 the British government authorised the sum of £1,200 (equivalent to £144,598 in 2023)[15] for a full-scale difference engine with attached printing apparatus based on the design of Per Georg Scheutz and his son Edvard to be constructed by Donkin's company, which had acquired a reputation for building machines for the colour printing of banknotes and stamps.

Costs overran and the company delivered the machine in July 1859, several weeks past the deadline, incurring a loss of £615 (equivalent to £77,812 in 2023).

Donkin was unhappy that he had lost so much money on the project, which he attributed to the engine's unexpected intricacy and the fact that he had very little to base his original cost estimate on, Edvard Scheutz having given him very little information.

In addition, costly machine tools had had to be made specially to make the engine's components and many alterations had been introduced along the way.

[16] The machine was used by William Farr at the General Register Office to compute life tables, which were published in 1864.

In the 1820s Donkin became a director of the Thames Tunnel Company,[2] having become acquainted with Marc Brunel when he had supplied equipment for his machinery at Chatham Dockyard.

Working with his partner John Wilks, he produced a machine which was used for the Excise and Stamp Office and also for the East India Company at Calcutta.

Donkin was one of the originators and a vice-president of the Institution of Civil Engineers, which was founded by Henry Robinson Palmer, one of his pupils.