Grace's Guide To British Industrial History

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Grace's Guide is the leading source of historical information on industry and manufacturing in Britain. This web publication contains 162,254 pages of information and 244,496 images on early companies, their products and the people who designed and built them.

Grace's Guide is the leading source of historical information on industry and manufacturing in Britain. This web publication contains 147,919 pages of information and 233,587 images on early companies, their products and the people who designed and built them.

Andrew Shanks

From Graces Guide
1864.

Andrew Shanks (1805-1869)

Engineer of 6 Robert Street, Adelphi, London.

1835 Partnership dissolved. '... the Partnership heretofore subsisting between as, m Engineers and Millwrights, at Liverpool, in the County of Lancaster, was this day dissolved by mutual consent: As witness our hands this 1st day of June 1835. Robert Barr, junr. Andrew Shanks.[1]

1849 Patented a centrifugal casting process for metal. Trials were undertaken at his brother's works in Johnstone[2] (presumably Thomas Shanks and Co).

1850 Machine Maker of Johnstone, near Glasgow and of 6 Robert Street, Adelphi, London.[3]

Died on 11th February 1869. [4]


1870 Obituary [5]

ANDREW SHANKS was born on 16th April 1805 at Dunfermline, Fifeshire, his father being a millwright engineer and partner in a cotton-spinning factory at Johnstone.

Having been brought up to mechanical engineering, he went in 1825 to London, where he was connected for a few years with the engineering department of Messrs. Meux's brewery; after which he returned to Johnstone, and gave his attention to carrying out improvements in machines and to the manufacture of steam engines and boilers at the engineering works established there by his father.

He afterwards removed to Liverpool, and was engaged in the manufacture of metallic pistons which were then coming into general use for steam engines.

In 1834 he entered the tool works of Messrs. Whitworth in Manchester; and in 1839 established himself in London in the same class of business, in which he continued till the time of his death.

He acquired a very extensive practical knowledge in mechanical engineering, and a considerable part of his designs and improvements in machinery were carried out under his instructions at the works at Johnstone, where machines of large size for engineering purposes were constructed.

His death took place on 11th February 1869 in the sixty-fourth year of his age, at Hastings, where he had removed after a serious accident that he had met with at Lincoln in the previous December.

He became a Member of the Institution in 1850.


See Also

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Sources of Information

  1. [The London Gazette Publication date:30 June 1835 Issue:19284 Page:1259]
  2. The Practical Mechanic's Journal, Sept 1849
  3. 1850 Institution of Mechanical Engineers: New Members
  4. The Engineer 1869/02/26
  5. 1870 Institution of Mechanical Engineers: Obituaries