John Taylor (civil engineer)

John Taylor (22 August 1779 in Norwich – 5 April 1863 in London) was a British mining engineer.

Taylor was the son of John and Susannah Taylor. He was the brother of Philip Taylor.

In 1796 Taylor improvised a mechanised copper ore crusher at Wheal Friendship, a mine just outside . This machine was improved over time and became widely adopted; it was known as the "Cornish rolls". Two years later, in 1798, when he was only 19 years old, he became the manager of this mine.

From 1803 to 1817 Taylor oversaw the construction of the , which linked the town of Tavistock to Morwellham Quay on the River Tamar, where cargo was loaded into ships.

In 1812 Taylor set up as a chemical manufacturer at Stratford, Essex. This enterprise, backed by the Martineau family, set out to produce vitriol, but as Taylor & Martineau became widely diversified. One of Taylor's interests was sugar refining, for which he took out a patent in 1815 for a pressure method for separation of sugar from molasses. The use of heated animal oils in sugar processes disclosed the production of naphtha. Taylor took out another patent in 1815, for decomposing animal oils into gas. This discovery led Taylor & Martineau into 1823 to what Philip Taylor's son later wrote of as "the battle of the gases": the commercial contest between gas lighting derived from coal and from oils. John Taylor's direction in the 1820s, however, was back into mining.

In 1819 Taylor raised the £65,000 needed to re-open the Consolidated Mines in Gwennap, Cornwall. This mine employed over 3,000 people and became the most productive in Cornwall, yielding almost 450,000 tons of copper ore. He was also mineral agent to the Duke of Devonshire and to the commissioners of Greenwich Hospital.

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