FAMOUS ENGINEER’S DEATH

Otago Daily Times, Issue 21598, 19 March 1932, Page 12

FAMOUS ENGINEER’S DEATH

PASSES AWAY IN SLEEP ‘ / STEAM ROAD-CAR PIONEER. Sir Alfred Yarrow, the famous shipbuilder, who remembered the days of stage coaches and took up flying as a hobby when he was 89, died in London recently, 11 days after entering his ninetyfirst year. He had been talking of his many interests just before he fell into the sleep in which he died. Sir Alfred was an enthusiast in many modern developments of mechanics. He built a steam road-car in 1861, erected the first private overhead telegraph in England, was the first typewriter user in England, and at 88 was the oldest man who ever broadcast. It was while still’an engineering apprentice of 18 that young Yarrow and a friend of the same age, inspired by hearing Faraday’s lectures, erected an overhead telegraph between their homes two streets apart in Barnsbury. London. A year later Yarrow and another youth built a steam road-car, which they drove once a week from Greenwich to Bromley. It was travelling one evening at 25 miles an hour when a policeman’s horse was frightened and threw its rider, whose leg was broken. , , This incident led to the off-quoted Act which ordered that mechanical road vehicles should be preceded by a man on foot with a red flag. Yarrow was only 23 when he began shipbuilding on the Isle oL Dogs, buying a public house and its yard for a works. Forty years later he moved his business to the Clyde. , ~ Sir Alfred told bow, in 1876, when the first consignment of typewriters came to England from America, the case containing 12 was dropped into the mud of- tho dock. When it was raised Yarrow bought the machines for a few shillings and cleaned one. Yarrow’s firm introduced the water-tube boiler, which proved of such importance in speeding up sea transport. "I was called a ‘visionary lunatic,”’ he once said, “ for saying I could build a craft to travel at 20 miles an hour, I have since succeeded in building them to go more than 40.” Sir Alfred had his first aeroplane flight last September, when he was one of 40 people who flew over London. Two months later he made a 3000-miles air tour of Europe.