page_title: John Smeaton
section_title: Legacy
hierarchical_section_title: John Smeaton / Legacy
caption_attribution_description: English: Signs on the John Smeaton Viaduct, part of the Leeds Inner Ring Road
context_page_description: John Smeaton FRS was an English civil engineer responsible for the design of bridges, canals, harbours and lighthouses. He was also a capable mechanical engineer and an eminent physicist. Smeaton was the first self-proclaimed "civil engineer", and is often regarded as the "father of civil engineering". He pioneered the use of hydraulic lime in concrete, using pebbles and powdered brick as aggregate. Smeaton was associated with the Lunar Society.
context_section_description: Smeaton died after suffering a stroke while walking in the garden of his family home at Austhorpe, and was buried in the parish church at Whitkirk, West Yorkshire. His surviving daughters erected a memorial to him and his wife, which is on the chancel wall of the church. 
  He is highly regarded by other engineers, having contributed to the Lunar Society and founded the Society of Civil Engineers in 1771. He coined the term civil engineers to distinguish them from military engineers graduating from the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich. The Society was a forerunner of the Institution of Civil Engineers, established in 1818, and was renamed the Smeatonian Society of Civil Engineers in 1830. His pupils included canal engineer William Jessop and architect and engineer Benjamin Latrobe.
  The pioneering constant of proportionality describing pressure varying as the square of the velocity when applied to objects moving in air was named Smeaton's coefficient in his honor. Based on his concepts and data, it was used by the Wright brothers in their pursuit of the first successful heavier-than-air aircraft.
  Between 1860 and 1894 the design of the reverse side of the old penny coin showed (behind Britannia) a depiction of Smeaton’s Eddystone lighthouse.
  Smeaton is one of six civil engineers depicted in the Stephenson stained glass window, designed by William Wailes and unveiled in Westminster Abbey in 1862. A memorial stone commemorating Smeaton himself was unveiled in the Abbey on 7 November 1994, by Noel Ordman, President of the Smeatonian Society of Civil Engineers. 
  John Smeaton Academy, a secondary school in the suburbs of Leeds adjacent to the Pendas Fields estate near Austhorpe, is named after Smeaton. He is also commemorated at the University of Plymouth, where the Mathematics and Technology Department is housed in a building named after him. A viaduct in the final stage of the Leeds Inner Ring Road, opened in 2008, was named after him.
  In 2003 Smeaton was named among the top 10 technological innovators in Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950. He is mentioned in the song "I Predict a Riot" (as a symbol of a more dignified and peaceful epoch in Leeds history; and in reference to a Junior School House at Leeds Grammar School, which lead singer Ricky Wilson attended) by the indie rock band Kaiser Chiefs, who are natives of Leeds.
caption: Signs on the John Smeaton Viaduct
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