Edwin Clark (civil engineer)

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Edwin Clark (7 January 1814 – 22 October 1894) was an English civil engineer who specialized in hydraulics. He is best known for designing the Anderton Boat Lift, opened in 1875 near Northwich in Cheshire, which lets boats move between the River Weaver and the Trent and Mersey Canal.

Clark was born in Great Marlow, Buckinghamshire, where his father made lace. He had two younger brothers and went to a local school. At age 11 he studied at a French academy in Normandy for three years, learning enough French to translate texts. After returning to England, he worked in his uncle’s solicitor’s office, then taught mathematics at Brook Green and later worked as a surveyor in western England.

In 1846 he moved to London and met Robert Stephenson, who made him the Superintending Engineer of the Britannia Bridge. Clark hired his brother Josiah Latimer Clark as his assistant. When the Britannia Bridge opened in 1850, Clark published The Britannia and Conway Tubular Bridges in three volumes. He then joined the Electric and International Telegraph Company, filing several telegraph patents. The London and North Western Railway used Clark’s telegraph line between London and Rugby from 1855. Stephenson left him £2000, which he used to build a telescope on his house in Honor Oak. Clark was also known for his astronomy.

In 1857 he became Engineer to Thames Graving Dock Limited and designed a hydraulic graving dock, lifting ships from the water with hydraulic presses. In 1866 he gave a lecture to the Institution of Civil Engineers and won the Telford Medal.

In 1870 Edward Leader Williams asked Clark to design a boat lift to raise boats 50 feet from the River Weaver to the Trent and Mersey Canal. The original hydraulic lift opened in 1875. It was later replaced by a wire rope and pulley system from 1908 to 1983, then restored to hydraulic operation in 2002. Clark also designed other boat lifts in Europe. In 1879 he proposed four lifts to Belgium; the project was approved in 1882 and partly completed by 1917.

When the canal was modernised in the 1960s, there were plans to demolish the old installations, but local efforts saved them. In 1988 the Canal du Centre site became a World Heritage Site. Restoration of the Belgian lifts continued, with progress reported in 2007.

Clark is remembered in art and in the name of a public trip boat at the Anderton Lift. He was also a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society.