William Handyside

William Handyside (1793–1850) was a Scottish engineer who was involved in several important construction projects in St. Petersburg.

Biography

Born in Edinburgh on 25 July 1793, to merchant Hugh Handyside and his wife Margaret, he was the eldest brother of Andrew Handyside and nephew of Charles Baird. On a visit to Scotland in 1810, Baird invited William, then a trainee architect, to join his flourishing business in St. Petersburg and live in his household.

His first projects included installing machinery at the imperial arsenal and glassworks and helping build the Elizaveta steamship, launched in 1815. He was a talented engineer and contributed to the development of Baird Works' steamship and steam engine manufacturing. He developed a gas lighting system for the factory and the sugar refining process conceived by Baird. When the company started working with Wilhelm von Traitteur and Pierre Bazaine on the first Russian suspension bridges in the 1820s, Handyside designed a machine to test the chains which is described in Traitteur's writings.

Most famously, Handyside worked with Auguste de Montferrand on the Alexander Column and St. Isaac's Cathedral. His experience was the basis for a paper presented to the Institution of Civil Engineers describing "methods of hauling large monoliths".[1] In 1835, a "communication" was read to the Philosophical Society of Edinburgh describing " ...the cutting and erection of the great Pillar at St Peterburgh in memory of Alexander the I, Emperor of Russia, by Wm. Handyside, Esq. Engineer, St Petersburgh, who was engaged on that occasion, and more particularly in the casting of the Bronze work." (original spelling)[2]

Handyside had a leading role in designing the large iron structure of the cathedral of St. Isaac dome, gilding it and casting the bronze ornamentation, though Francis Baird oversaw the later stages of this process. He worked on the ground level colonnade of pillars and the columns supporting the dome and devised special machinery to help with construction.[3]

After Baird's death in 1843, William and Andrew Handyside both returned to the UK though other Handyside brothers remained in Russia. William retired, while taking some part in the proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers which he had belonged to since 1822.

He died on 26 May 1850 at his mother's Edinburgh home, where she had died the preceding month.

Family

Later, in 1829, Handyside married Sophia Gordon Busch and had four children.

Notes
  1. Biog. Dic. of Civil Engineers
  2. The Scotsman, 28 March 1835
  3. Anderson 1890.
gollark: Almost certainly mostly environment, yes.
gollark: It's easy to say that if you are just vaguely considering that, running it through the relatively unhurried processes of philosophizing™, that sort of thing. But probably less so if it's actually being turned over to emotion and such, because broadly speaking people reaaaallly don't want to die.
gollark: Am I better at resisting peer pressure than other people: well, I'd *like* to think so, but so would probably everyone else ever.
gollark: Anyway, I have, I think, reasonably strong "no genocide" ethics. But I don't know if, in a situation where everyone seemed implicitly/explicitly okay with helping with genocides, and where I feared that I would be punished if I either didn't help in some way or didn't appear supportive of helping, I would actually stick to this, since I don't think I've ever been in an environment with those sorts of pressures.
gollark: Maybe I should try arbitrarily increasing the confusion via recursion.

References
  • Anderson, Robert Edward (1890). "Handyside, William" . In Stephen, Leslie; Lee, Sidney (eds.). Dictionary of National Biography. 24. London: Smith, Elder & Co.
  • Chrimes, Mike (2004). "Handyside, William (1793–1850)". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press.
  • A.W Skempton, M.M. Chrimes, R.C.Cox, P.S.M. Cross-Rudkin, R.W. Rennison, E.C. Ruddock (2002). Biographical Dictionary of Civil Engineers in Great Britain and Ireland, Vol 1. London. ISBN 0-7277-2939-X.CS1 maint: uses authors parameter (link)
  • Scotsman archives

See also
  • Moika River
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