William Pole

William Pole (22 April 181430 December 1900) was an English engineer, astronomer, musician and an authority on Whist. Life He was born in Birmingham on 22 April 1814, the son of Thomas Pole. Pole was apprenticed as an engineer to Charles H. Capper in Birmingham around 1828. He then went to India in 1844 as professor of engineering at Elphinstone College, Bombay, where he had organized a course of instruction for Indian students; his health obliged him to return to England in 1848. For the next ten years he worked in London under James Simpson and James Meadows Rendel, and was appointed in 1859 to the chair of civil engineering at University College, London. With official work from the government, he served on committees which considered the application of armour to ships and fortifications (1861–1864), and the comparative advantages of Whitworth and Armstrong guns (1863–1865). Pole was secretary to the Royal Commission on Railways (1865–1867), the Duke of Richmond's Commission on London Water (1867–1869), also taking part in the subsequent proceedings for establishing a constant supply, the Royal Commission on the Disposal of London Sewage (1882–1884), and the departmental committee on the science museums at South Kensington in 1885. In 1871 he was employed by the War Office to report on the Martini-Henry rifle, and in the same year was appointed consulting engineer in London to the Japanese government, a position through which he exercised considerable influence on the development of the Japanese railway system. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1861, in recognition of some investigations on color-blindness.