John Isaac Thornycroft

Sir John Isaac Thornycroft (1 February 1843 – 28 June 1928) was an English shipbuilder, the founder of the Thornycroft shipbuilding company and member of the Thornycroft family. Early life He was born in 1843 to Mary Francis and Thomas Thornycroft. He attended the Regent Street Polytechnic and then the Royal School of Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering at South Kensington and at the same time, he began building the steam launch Nautilus in his father's study. Nautilus was a fast boat with a reliable engine (also built by Thornycroft), and in 1862 it proved to be the first steam launch with enough speed to follow the contenders in the University race. The ensuing publicity prompted his father to purchase a strip of land along the Thames, adjacent to Chesterman's yard at Chiswick in 1864, and that became the start of John Thornycroft's shipbuilding career. In 1866 Thornycroft took over Chesterman's yard completely, and John I. Thornycroft & Company was formally established, but at the beginning, John Thornycroft did not work there full-time. Instead he worked for a while at Palmers Shipbuilding and Iron Company in Jarrow-on-Tyne before studying for a diploma in engineering at the University of Glasgow. At Glasgow he studied under Lord Kelvin and Professor Macquorn Rankine. In 1870, Thornycroft married Blanche Ada Coules (1846–1936) and they had two sons and five daughters. Three of their children, John Edward Thornycroft, Blanche Thornycroft and Isaac Thomas (known as Tom) Thornycroft would go on to be involved in the family business. Edith Alice; Mary Beatrix; Ada Francis; and Eldred Elizabeth do not seem to have been involved.