George Ernest Stevenson (1848-1899), Gas engineer, M. Inst. C.E.
1898 President of the Institution of Gas Engineers. He was the engineer of the Manchester Corporation gasworks.
1900 Obituary [1]
GEORGE ERNEST STEVENSON, born on the 6th September, 1848, was the eldest son of the late Mr. George Wilson Stevenson, of Parliament Street, Westminster.
He received his early training in the Locomotive Works of the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway, and subsequently in his father’s office.
His first charge was the management of the Pembroke Dock Gasworks at the early age of twenty-three.
In 1872 he was appointed Engineer to the Aberdare Gasworks, which post, however, he resigned in the following year, to take the management of works at Prague and in Hungary.
On his return to England he obtained, in 1876, the post of Engineer and Manager of the Peterborough Gasworks, which he held for nine years, only terminating it on being appointed, in 1885, Engineer of the Buenos Ayres New Gas Company. At Buenos Ayres Mr. Stevenson remained for six years, the last two of which were devoted exclusively to consulting work.
In addition to the extensive enlargements required f or the Buenos Ayres New Gas Company, he designed and erected gasworks in Argentina at La Plata and Parana. The revolution of 1890, however, brought to a sudden end the commercial prosperity whish had for some years been so extraordinary in Argentina, and Mr. Stevenson returned once more to England.
He was shortly afterwards appointed Manager of the Rochdale Road Station of the Manchester Corporation Gas Department, eventually being raised to the position of Chief Engineer to the Department; and in that capacity he designed and carried out all the large extensions and improvements required by the ever-growing demand for gas in that city.
Mr. Stevenson was a Member of the old Gas Institute, and on his return from Argentina joined the new Institution of Gas Engineers, of which he was President in the year 1898. He contributed many Papers to the meetings of these bodies and to the Midland Gas Managers Association and the Manchester Gas Managers Association, of both of which he was a Member. Perhaps the most useful of his contributions was that on "The Advantage of the Regenerative System of Heating," read before the Gas Institute at Birmingham in the year 1881.
Mr. Stevenson met his death on the 30th October, 1899, by an accident caused by an explosion while he was superintending extensive alterations to the connecting pipes at the Rochdale Road Gasworks.
He was elected an Associate on the 4th December, 1877, was subsequently placed in the class of Associate Members, and was transferred to the class of Members on the 22nd January, 1889. In 1890 he contributed to the Proceedings a Paper entitled "The Gas-Supply of Buenos Ayres."