James Brindley

James Brindley (1716-1772) was an English engineer, born in Tunstead, Derbyshire and largely based in Leek, Staffordshire, who became one of the most prominent engineers of the eighteenth century despite having almost no formal education. He apprenticed with a millwright at seventeen and worked as a wheelwright before establishing himself doing millwright work, and by 1750 he was renting a shop from the Wedgwood family in Burslem, where he built a reputation for ingenuity with machinery repairs. His major achievement was the Bridgewater Canal, opened in 1761 and often regarded as the first British canal of the modern era, part of roughly 365 miles of canals he designed over his life; his most striking single feat was the Barton Aqueduct, which carried the canal 12 meters above the River Irwell. He pioneered the use of puddled clay to make canal beds watertight, a technique widely adopted afterward, and he designed the narrow canal lock that came to define the waterways of the English Midlands. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/