Wednesday 14 November 2007

John Smeaton Ramsgate Dry Dock



Looking at Ramsgate dry dock leaking badly during the recent tidal surge I was reminded of reading John Smeaton’s account of its first test in 1787 and the subsequent disaster.

Back in the 1700s the building of harbours and docks was the rocket science of the day and many things went wrong. In the case of the dry dock the builder ignored the advice of Smeaton the civil engineer with fairly spectacular results click here to read it or you can read it in the reprint of An Historical report on Ramsgate Harbour 1791 By John Smeaton that I publish. It is a most charmingly account of a man explaining the failings of others.


3 comments:

  1. Fo it waf all fucked up by the preffure of water. Fafcinating.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Well he did obferve a confiderable ftream of water iffuing from under the apron and it was certainly piffing out during the fpring tide.

    ReplyDelete
  3. People should read this.

    ReplyDelete

Comments, since I started writing this blog in 2007 the way the internet works has changed a lot, comments and dialogue here were once viable in an open and anonymous sense. Now if you comment here I will only allow the comment if it seems to make sense and be related to what the post is about. I link the majority of my posts to the main local Facebook groups and to my Facebook account, “Michael Child” I guess the main Ramsgate Facebook group is We Love Ramsgate. For the most part the comments and dialogue related to the posts here goes on there. As for the rest of it, well this blog handles images better than Facebook, which is why I don’t post directly to my Facebook account, although if I take a lot of photos I am so lazy that I paste them directly from my camera card to my bookshop website and put a link on this blog.