This month's featured engineers are:
Brindley is best remembered as the engineer of some of the earliest British canals, including the famous Bridgewater Canal, which linked coalmines at Worsley to Manchester and the River Mersey, and started the canal age in Britain.
There was more to Brindley's work than canal engineering; he was a distinguished millwright and mining engineer. Copies of Brindley's diaries are held in the Institution of Civil Engineers archives.
Brassey was perhaps the most important civil engineering contractor in the world in the nineteenth century, building railways in Britain, Europe, Asia, Australia and both North and South America.
Originally trained as a land surveyor, he began contracting for railway work in the mid-1830s, striking up an immediate rapport with Joseph Locke, for whom he carried out numerous contracts, initially in Britain and subsequently, in partnership with William Mackenzie, in France. When Mackenzie fell ill, Brassey formed other partnerships, most famously as Brassey, Peto & Betts, and also with Wythes, Field, and Crampton.
Brassey accumulated a vast fortune, becoming one of the wealthiest commoners of the nineteenth century. His shrewd financial management enabled him to survive the crashes of the 1840s and 1860s.
Most of Brassey's business records were destroyed, with the exception of material in the Mackenzie Collection in the ICE archives, and the Charles Jones Collection, acquired in 2008. Much more material can be found in The National Archives, however.
Telford, first President of the Institution of Civil Engineers (1820-1834), dominated the civil engineering profession in the British Isles after the death of John Rennie (1821).
Originally trained as a stonemason he became a civil engineer relatively late in life, but seized the opportunities of being appointed county surveyor in Shropshire and resident engineer under William Jessop on the Ellesmere canal, to establish his reputation as a great engineer, most famously at Pontcysyllte. With Jessop he was associated in the design of the great works on the Caledonian canal.
Telford was engineer for Highland roads and harbour improvements and for the Holyhead road project. The latter involved the design of the longest-span bridge erected to that date - the Menai suspension bridge. This consolidated his international reputation which had been established with his consultancy role on the Gotha canal in Sweden. His iron bridge designs, most notably those at Bonar, Craigellachie and Tewkesbury, were widely admired for their aesthetic qualities.
Telford left his papers to the ICE on his death and many survive. Other important collections of his work are held at Ironbridge Gorge Museum, the Public Records Office and Scottish Records Office.