Henry Robinson Palmer

Henry Robinson Palmer (1795–1844) was a British civil engineer who designed the world's second monorail and the first elevated railway. He is also credited as the inventor of corrugated metal roofing, still one of the world's major building materials. Early life A son of Samuel Palmer and his wife Elizabeth Walker, Henry Robinson Palmer was born in Hackney, east London. He served a five-year apprenticeship with the mechanical engineer Bryan Donkin from 1811, where he also became a skilled draughtsman. He was then taken on by Thomas Telford, for whom he worked for some seven years, rising to become his chief assistant. He carried out numerous surveys for Telford, including the Knaresborough Canal and Railway, Burnham Marshes, Archway Road London, Portishead Harbour, and the Isles of Scilly. He may have acted as the resident engineer for the Loose Hill and Valley Road improvement scheme, which he surveyed in 1820. In 1821 he obtained a patent for a monorail system, which was deemed at the time to be somewhat impractical, but his work on resistance to tractive effort was much more important. In 1825 he visited the Stockton and Darlington Railway and the Hetton colliery railway. On the latter he carried out a series of tests on behalf of Telford, to measure the amount of resistance that horses and locomotives had to overcome to move their loads. Further tests were carried out with boats on a number of canals, including the Ellesmere Canal, the Mersey and Irwell Navigation and the Grand Junction Canal. The results of these experiments were quoted in Parliament, when navigation interests opposed the bill to authorise the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, for instance.