Background
Sir Benjamin Baker was born near Bath, United Kingdom in 1840; the son of Benjamin Baker and Sarah Hollis.
Sir Benjamin Baker was born near Bath, United Kingdom in 1840; the son of Benjamin Baker and Sarah Hollis.
Baker was educated at Cheltenham Grammar School and, at the age of 16, became an apprentice at Messrs Price and Fox at the Neath Abbey Iron Works.
After receiving his early training in a South Wales ironworks, Baker became associated with Sir John Fowler in London. He took part in the construction of the Metropolitan railway (London), and in designing the cylindrical vessel in which Cleopatra's Needle, now standing on the Thames Embankment, London, was brought over from Egypt to England in 1877-1878. By this time he had already made himself an authority on bridge-construction, and shortly afterwards he was engaged on the work which made his reputation with the general public-the design and erection of the Forth Bridge.
Sir Benjamin Baker, who also had a large share in the introduction of the system widely adopted in London of constructing intra-urban railways in deep tubular tunnels built up of cast iron segments, obtained an extremely large professional practice, ranging over almost every branch of civil engineering, and was more or less directly concerned with most of the great engineering achievements of his day. He died at Pangbourne, Berks, on the 19th of May 1907.
Baker designed and engineered the Forth Bridge after the Tay bridge collapse. On the completion of the Forth Bridge in 1890 he was made Knight Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George. Twelve years later at the formal opening of the Assuan dam, for which he was consulting-engineer, he was created Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath. He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1899.
In 1890 the Royal Society recognized Baker's scientific attainments by electing him one of its fellows, of which he was a vice president from 1896 to his death in 1907. He was also was president of the Institution of Civil Engineers in 1895–96.
