Thomas Tredgold

[1] Later Tredgold went to London, where he entered the office of his uncle William Atkinson the architect,[2] with whom he lived for six years, and whom he served for longer.

[citation needed] Tredgold left a widow, three daughters, and a son Thomas, who held the post of engineer in the office of stamps of the East India Company at Calcutta, where he died on 4 May 1853.

Apart from Peter Barlow's Essay on the Strength of Timber and other Materials in 1817, Tredgold's work was the first serious attempt in England to deal practically and scientifically with the data of resistance[clarification needed]; before his time engineers relied mainly on the formulæ and results found in Count Buffon and Peter van Musschenbroek's Physicæ Experimentales et Geometricæ (Leyden, 1729); some of Tredgold's results were taken from Gabriel Pierre Martin Dumont's Parallèle de plans des plus belles salles de spectacles d'ltalie et de France (Paris, 1767).

[1] In 1824, Tredgold published Principles of Warming and Ventilating Public Buildings (London), which reached a second edition in the same year (3rd edit., with appendix by Bramah, 1836).

James Hann assisted Woodhouse,[3] and a third edition appeared in 1850–3 (London), with contributions in particular by John Seaward[4] and Edward Woods.

[1] Tredgold gave an influential definition of civil engineering, on which the charter of the Institution of Civil Engineers based itself in 1828: A Society for the general advancement of Mechanical Science, and more particularly for promoting the acquisition of that species of knowledge which constitutes the profession of a Civil Engineer; being the art of directing the great sources of power in Nature for the use and convenience of man, as the means of production and of traffic in states, both for external and internal trade, as applied in the construction of roads, bridges, aqueducts, canals, river navigation, and docks, for internal intercourse and exchange; and in the construction of ports harbours, moles, breakwaters, and lighthouses, and in the art of navigation by artificial power, for the purposes of commerce; and in the construction and adaptation of machinery, and in the drainage of cities and towns.