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James Bicheno Francis was born on May 18, 1815 at Southleigh, Oxfordshire, England, the son of John Francis and Eliza Frith (Bicheno) Francis. His father was superintendent and constructor of one of the early short railroads in the south of Wales and it was quite natural that his son should be trained to follow in his footsteps.
Accordingly after a bit of an education at Radleigh Hall and Wantage Academy in Berkshire, young Francis became assistant to his father at the early age of fourteen on the construction of some canal and harbor works connected with the railroad.
At the beginning of his career Francis remained working on the construction of some canal and harbor works connected with the railroad. He stayed there for two years and then was employed by the Great Western Canal Company in construction work, particularly in Devonshire and Somersetshire.
After two years with this company and in the hope of finding greater opportunities in America, Francis arrived in New York City in the spring of 1833 and almost immediately was employed by Major George W. Whistler, a prominent early American engineer, in the construction of the Stonington Railroad (Connecticut). A year later Whistler became chief engineer of a group known as the “Proprietors of the Locks and Canals on the Merrimack River, ” organized to expand the company’s machine-shop business to include locomotive construction. Francis, then eighteen years old, accompanied Whistler to Lowell, Massachusetts, and entered the service of the proprietors as a draftsman. One of his first tasks was that of dismembering, measuring, and making detailed working drawings of a newly imported locomotive built by Stephenson in England and purchased to serve as a model for the engines of the Boston & Lowell Railroad. This was the beginning of locomotive building in New England. In 1837 Whistler resigned and Francis, at the age of twenty-two, was made his successor.
In the course of the succeeding three or four years Francis conducted his office most efficiently, and although there was a decline in locomotive construction, the demand for the design and erection of cotton-mills increased. About 1841 the proprietors undertook through a specially appointed commission to determine the quantities of water drawn by the mills along the canal, and Francis was entrusted with the details of securing the needed data. So well did he conduct this work, involving much original experiment, that when in 1845 his employers decided to give up the machine-shop and confine their full attention to the development of water-power facilities at Lowell, Francis was made chief engineer and general manager. From that time on, for more than forty years, he not only looked after the firm’s water-power interests, but acted as consulting engineer to all of the factories using the power. It has always been claimed that Francis was in large part responsible for Lowell’s rise to industrial importance.
In 1846 he began the work of water-power development by the construction of the Northern Canal. In this, as in all of his subsequent work, he made thorough investigations and conducted many experiments before undertaking actual construction. In 1849, on behalf of the manufacturing interests of Lowell, he went to England to study timber-preservation methods.
Upon his return he designed and constructed works at Lowell for both kyanizing and burnettizing timber. About this time Francis turned his attention to hydraulic turbines and designed one based on the Howd patent but with the vanes reshaped to bring about a combination of the radial and axial flow turbine. This type, known as the mixed flow or Francis turbine, is to-day the one most generally used for low head installations.
Tests of the design, his simultaneous researches on the flow of water through draft tubes, over weirs, and through short canals, as well as the rules for runner and draft tube design which he formulated were published by Francis in 1835 under the title The Lowell Hydraulic Experiments. Much of these data is used in engineering practice at the present time. For the associated companies’ benefit Francis devised a complete system of water supply for fire protection purposes and had it in operation in the Lowell district many years before anything equally complete was to be found elsewhere.
In 1870 he undertook and completed another notable work, namely, the design and construction of hydraulic lifts for the guard gates of the Pawtucket Canal. Again, between 1875 and 1876, he reconstructed the Pawtucket Dam across the Merrimac River.
Francis’s fundamental practise of holding closely to experiment caused him to become probably the first person in America to conduct actual tests on large cast-iron girders. He is probably most famous for having invented the Francis turbine in 1848, which was a more efficient successor to the Boyden turbine of Uriah A. Boyden which was first demonstrated at Lowell. Francis was also responsible for the construction of the Northern Canal and Moody Street Feeder. While his duties were most arduous, he found time to write over two hundred valuable papers for various learned societies. He was one of the original members and president in 1874 of the Boston Society of Civil Engineers. He joined the American Society of Civil Engineers at its first meeting in 1832 and was its president in 1880. In addition to his regular duties in Lowell, he was consulted in the construction of the Quaker Bridge Dam on the Croton River, New York, and the retaining dam at St. Anthony’s Falls on the Mississippi River. He was a member of the Massachusetts state legislature for one year; served five years in the Lowell city council; was for twenty years president of the Stonybrook Railroad, and for forty- three years a director of the Lowell Gas Light Company.
(This work has been selected by scholars as being cultural...)
(This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)
Francis was one of the original members and president in 1874 of the Boston Society of Civil Engineers. He joined the American Society of Civil Engineers at its first meeting in 1832 and was its president in 1880.
As an engineer, referee, and expert, Francis was probably called upon to decide more varied questions of importance than usually falls to the lot of one man. This was due to his strength of character, solidity, and strong common sense.
His habits of thought were unusually methodical and accurate. These qualities, combined with his insistence upon investigating every question put to him, enabled him to supplement the deficiencies of his early education and training so that he became one of the best equipped engineers of his time.
James Bicheno Francis married Sarah Wilbur Brownell of Lowell on July 12, 1837. One of his sons succeeded him upon his retirement from active business in 1883, and at the time of his death in Lowell he was survived by his wife and six children.
