George Heald
| George Heald | |
|---|---|
| Born | 2 June 1816 Wakefield, Yorkshire, England |
| Died | 25 May 1858 Rugeley, Staffordshire, England |
| Nationality | English |
| Occupation | Civil engineer |
| Parent(s) | Thomas and Sarah Heald (née Murray) |
George Heald (2 June 1816 – 25 May 1858) was a civil engineer active at the beginning of the 19th century, notable for his role in the building of railways that formed part of the Grand Junction Railway, the Lancaster and Carlisle Railway, the Caledonian Railway and the North Midland Railway. Nowadays he is largely forgotten but to his contemporaries and those that followed immediately afterwards, he was one of the key engineers of the early railway age being listed alongside Brunel, Stephenson, Locke and Cubitt in George Drysdale Dempsey's book, the Practical Railway Engineer. He was a colleague and friend of Robert Stephenson and also worked with other notable railway engineers such as Joseph Locke and Thomas Brassey.
George was born and raised in Wakefield, Yorkshire. His father, Thomas Heald, was a wealthy hatter and parfumier. Thomas Heald's business interests involved travelling to London. After he was widowed he married Sarah Murray of Westminster, London who was eighteen years his junior. George was born to Sarah and was raised in a small family with nine out of ten elder step-siblings having died. The family was well educated and Sarah and her sister, Ann, ran a school founded under the auspices of the Gaskell family that included Elizabeth Gaskell, at Thornes near Wakefield. George was educated from a young age in this environment and achieved a high competence in maths as his published material demonstrates.
By 1839 he was a qualified civil engineer and made a presentation to the Institution of Civil Engineers in London about the Land Surveyors Calculator. Unlike some of his early contemporaries in the construction of railways who were practical men, George Heald was concerned with the theory and science of railway construction. Two surviving publications demonstrate his interest in communicating the principles of railway construction. In 1838 he published a booklet entitled, "Description and use of Heald's Universal Scale for measuring earthworks". A further book was published by Weale and Co. of London, technical and medical publishers, in 1847, "A complete and much improved system of setting out railway curves. Comprising, at one, brevity, simplicity and accuracy". Heald was a highly regarded teacher in the field of railway civil engineering. Richard Price-Williams an honorary fellow of the Institute of Mechanical Engineers, who in 1866 persuaded the railway companies to use steel rails, cited George Heald on more than one occasion. In an interview given in 1894 Price-Williams said he began his career with 'the eminent engineer George Heald who was responsible for the construction of so many of the great British railways'. In Price-Williams' obituary of 1916 the author said that he had been 'a pupil of the late Mr. George Heald, M. Inst. C.E., on the construction of the Lancaster, Carlisle, and Caledonian Railways in the forties of the last century'.
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