John Braithwaite the elder (1760–1818), was a British
engineer,
and
salvor
Marine salvage is the process of recovering a ship and its cargo after a shipwreck or other maritime casualty. Salvage may encompass towing, re-floating a vessel, or effecting repairs to a ship. Today, protecting the coastal environment from ...
.
John Braithwaite the younger was his son.
Life
Braithwaite is best known as the constructor of one of the earliest successful forms of
diving bell. In 1783 he descended in one of his own construction into the wreck of the
Royal George, which had gone down off
Spithead in the August of the previous year, and recovered her sheet anchor and many of her guns. In the same year, and by the same means, he recovered a number of guns sunk in the Spanish flotilla off
Gibraltar
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.
In 1788, again he made a descent to the wreck of the
Hartwell Hartwell may refer to:
Places
* Hartwell, Victoria, a neighbourhood of Camberwell in Melbourne, Australia
** Hartwell railway station
England
* Hartwell, Buckinghamshire
* Hartwell, Northamptonshire, a village
* Hartwell, Staffordshire, a loca ...
, an
East Indiaman
East Indiaman was a general name for any sailing ship operating under charter or licence to any of the East India trading companies of the major European trading powers of the 17th through the 19th centuries. The term is used to refer to vesse ...
, lost off
Boa Vista, one of the
Cape Verde
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islands, and recovered dollars to the value of £38,000, 7,000 pigs of lead, and 360 boxes of tin.
In 1806, he raised from the Abergavenny, an East Indiaman, lost off Portland, £75,000 worth of dollars, a quantity of tin, and other property to the value of £30,000, and successfully blew up the wreck with
gunpowder.
For these purposes, in addition to perfecting the actual diving apparatus, he devised machinery for sawing ships asunder under water. His ancestors had carried on a small engineers' shop at
St Albans
St Albans () is a cathedral city in Hertfordshire, England, east of Hemel Hempstead and west of Hatfield, Hertfordshire, Hatfield, north-west of London, south-west of Welwyn Garden City and south-east of Luton. St Albans was the first major ...
since 1695. His own engineering works were in the
New Road, London.
Legacy
Braithwaite died in June 1818 at
Westbourne Green
Westbourne Green is an area of Westbourne, London, the centre of the former hamlet of Westbourne, at the north-western corner of the City of Westminster. It is named for its location west of a bourne (small stream).
Traditionally a rural area, ...
from the effects of a stroke of paralysis.
His business was afterwards carried on by his two sons, Francis and
John.
Notes
References
* Endnotes:
**''Gentlemen's Magazine'' 1818, pt. i. 644.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Braithwaite, John
1818 deaths
1760 births
British inventors