Philip Taylor (civil engineer)
A significant innovator of the 1820s in steam engine design, he moved abroad to become an industrial leader in France and Italy (Kingdom of Sardinia).
[1] Between 1801 and 1805 Taylor was with his brother John, who was employed by a copper mine in western Devon, for the Martineau family of Norwich.
He set up a factory to make wooden pillboxes, turning the first specimens on a small lathe powered by a pet spit-dog.
[8] This discovery led in 1823 to what Philip Taylor's son later wrote of as "the battle of the gases": the commercial contest between gas lighting derived from coal and from oils.
[10] Philip Taylor invented a method of lighting public and private buildings by oil-gas, in connection with which he took out a patent on 15 June 1824 for an apparatus for producing gas from various substances (No.
The Bow Gas Company obtained an act of parliament in 1821, when the main proprietors were John, Philip and Edward Taylor along with Thomas Martineau.
[15] Sir Walter Scott was an early adopter, for Abbotsford, and became one of the Edinburgh promoters of Taylor & Martineau, where James Milne was their agent.
[18] In the end, and internationally, economic forces meant that oil-gas lost ground to the cheaper coal-gas, and were not overcome by promotion or technically.
Later they sold a boiler and steam engine to Marc Seguin, French rail pioneer, then working for a steamer company on the Rhône River.
[24] Taylor assisted Marc Isambard Brunel in 1821 in his financial difficulties, and was a director of the Thames Tunnel Company, though he resigned from its board in April 1825.
[27] In 1834 Taylor submitted to Louis-Philippe a scheme for supplying Paris with water by a tunnel from the River Marne to a hill at Ivry.
[1] In 1846 he went into partnership with the Marseille ironmaster Amédée Armand, thus putting together an industrial empire with all the components for the manufacture of steam vessels.
[30] Taylor's recruitment of British engineers and foremen proved to be significant in the transfer of new technology to the Mediterranean countries.
[1][35] In bad health, Taylor disposed of his business, the Compagnie des Forges et Chantiers de la Méditerranée, in 1855 to a new consortium.
[1] Taylor's circle included John Loudon McAdam, James Nasmyth, David Ricardo, Henry Maudslay, Robert Stephenson, Michael Faraday, Charles MacIntosh, Brunel, Francis John Hyde Wollaston, George Rennie, and Charles Wheatstone; also Humboldt, Gay-Lussac, Arago, and Jean-Baptiste Say.
He prided himself on having taken part in the first steamboat trip at sea, on having seen the start of the first steam-engine, and on having witnessed at Somerset House Wheatstone's first electric telegraph experiments.
