The youngest son of John Lloyd of King's Lynn, Norfolk, he was born in London on 1 May 1800, and was educated successively at private schools in Tooting and Winchester, and learned some science.
[1] The end of the Napoleonic Wars meant Lloyd did not join the army as he desired, but was sent out to his elder brother, who was King's Counsel on Tortola.
In November 1827 he was commissioned by Bolivar to survey for Gran Colombia the Isthmus of Panama and possibilities of connecting the Atlantic with the Pacific.
In 1851 Lloyd acted as special commissioner, with James Lyon Playfair, for industrial products from London and manufacturing districts, for the Great Exhibition.
For the Board of Admiralty and Royal Society, he determined the difference of level in the River Thames between London Bridge and the sea, with a report appeared in Philosophical Transactions for 1831.
[1] A Telford medal of the Institute of Civil Engineers was awarded to Lloyd for paper communicated in 1849 on the Facilities for a Ship Canal between the Atlantic and Pacific.
In his opinion "There was nothing but the climate and the expense to prevent a canal being cut from one sea to the other of sufficient depth to float the largest ship in her majesty's navy".
[1] Apart from his significant contribution to the organisation and management of the Great Exhibition in 1851, he was awarded a Prize Medal in his own right as the inventor of the 'typhodeictor', an instrument for obtaining the bearing and relative position of a storm or hurricane.
A volume Papers relating to Proposals for establishing Colleges of Arts and Manufactures for the Industrial Classes was printed for private circulation, in 1851.