William Jessop

William Jessop (1745-1814) was an English civil engineer whose career spanned canal, dock and early railway construction in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He managed the Grand Canal of Ireland from 1772 to 1805, crossing the difficult Bog of Allen, and the Grand Junction Canal from 1793 to 1805, a waterway of ninety miles connecting London to the Midlands, and he engineered the West India Docks on the Isle of Dogs between 1800 and 1802, a wet dock covering 295 acres and 24 feet deep that could hold 600 ships. His other work included the Cromford Canal, with its 2,966 yard Butterley Tunnel, and the Surrey Iron Railway from Wandsworth to Croydon, arguably the first public railway in the world, though horse drawn. In 1790 he co-founded the Butterley Iron Works in Derbyshire, which manufactured cast iron edge rails. He served twice as mayor of Newark and died at Butterley Hall in Derbyshire in 1814. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/