Britain's Most Momentous Civil Engineer

Virtually all aspects of modern civil engineering were pioneered in Britain. The engineers behind these advances - Brunel, Telford, George Stephenson and Robert Stephenson to name a few - are household names that are held in enormously high esteem by the British public. Brunel, for instance, came second in the national 2002 poll for the Greatest Briton. An major University is named after him. George Stephenson also made the top 100. Telford has an entire town named after him. He and Robert Stephenson are interred in Westminster Abbey. We intend to investigate whether their reputations are deserved, and try to rank their momentousness. Here we will just summarise the process and shortlist.

Our idea of momentousness means lasting benefit, through exceptional design, exceptional construction, use of new materials, innovation, legacy infrastructure, constructive use of wealth, establishing good standards, and chains of influence. So, for example, William Jessop was John Smeaton's protege, so Smeaton gets some credit for Jessop's achievements. As we say in all our blogs, everything useful will be invented by someone eventually. What's important here is how long it would have taken for someone else to do whatever our candidates are famous for, had they never lived; in other words, how much they brought forward the benefits of their innovations and achievements.

Our shortlist - shown above in birth order - is fairly uncontentious: James Brindley, John Smeaton, William Jessop, Thomas Telford, John Rennie the Elder, George Stephenson, Robert Stephenson, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, and Joseph Bazelgette. We intend to write a blog about each of them. We have had to add a rule that we have not used elsewhere, that parental influence does not count, in order to prevent George Stephenson getting all the credit for his son's achievements.

We have already written about George Stephenson and Thomas Telford who we rank fith and sixth respectively. We will announce the position of each of the others as we come to write about them.