1898: Samuel Waite Johnson

Samuel Waite Johnson (1831-1912)

24th President of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers

Johnson was born at Bramley, near Leeds, England on 14 October 1831. His father was an engineer with the Great Northern Railway Company. After attending Leeds Grammar School, he was apprenticed to E. B. Wilson & Co, Railway Foundry. Here he was a pupil of James Fenton, a partner in the firm, and he assisted in the design of the ‘Jenny Lind’ type of engine. He also worked on the ‘Bloomer’ type, introduced on the Southern Division of the London and North Western Railway.

After leaving the firm he became assistant district loco superintendent on the Great Northern Railway. In 1859, he was appointed acting locomotive superintendent of the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway at Gorton. After a series of similar positions with the Edinburgh and Glasgow Railway Company, North British Railway Company and the Great Eastern Railway, he was made the head of the locomotive works of the Midland Railway at Derby in 1873. He held this position for thirty years, until his retirement in 1903.

While with the Midland he introduced many important changes in the design and construction of locomotives. He was awarded the Gold Medal at the Saltaire Exhibition in 1877, for his four-wheeled coupled express bogie engine, ‘Beatrice’. He won the Grand Prix at the Paris Exhibition in 1889 for his single-acting-wheel express passenger engine, No. 1853. He also introduced a larger class of boiler after 1900, in which the working pressure was raised to 195lb per square inch.

He died in Nottingham on 14 January 1912.

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