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1892-1893: Sir William Anderson
Sir William Anderson (1835-1898)
21st President of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers
Anderson was born in St. Petersburg, Russia in 1835.
He came to London, England in 1849 and began a three-year course in applied sciences at King's College. In 1851, he became a pupil at Sir William Fairbairn's Canal Street Works, Manchester, England. He became manager of Courtney, Stephens and Co at Blackhall Iron Works in Dublin, Ireland in 1854. The following year he was made a partner. The company made many iron bridges, including the Malahide Viaduct, along with other constructive ironwork for railways and canal, and signalling apparatus and turntables.
He then moved to Easton and Amos at the Grove Works, Southwark, England. They had decided to erect large new works at Erith, and Anderson was responsible for the laying out of the works. When completed, they considered a model of what an engineering works should be.
In 1871, he went to Egypt to work on the building of three large sugar factories, and three years later went to Japan to oversee the erection of the Ogi Paper Mill in Japan. He gave an account of the Mill to the Institution in 1876.
Later in his career, he became involved with ordnance. In 1889, at the request of the Explosive Committee of the War Office, he undertook the design of machinery for the manufacture of the new explosive, Cordite. In August of the same year, he was appointed Director General of Ordnance Factories, and the Cordite machinery project was passed to his eldest son. His new position saw him responsible for the ordnance factories, laboratory, carriage department and gun factory at Woolwich Arsenal, the small-arms factories at Enfield and Birmingham, and the gunpowder factory at Waltham Abbey. Of the many hundred guns which were produced during his administration, which were at least 50 percent more powerful than the guns the superseded, not a single failure or accident of any kind occurred.
Anderson died in 1898.
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