John Smeaton

John Smeaton was a British civil engineer, often called the first person to describe himself as a civil engineer, whose systematic experiments in the 1750s measuring the efficiency of waterwheels and windmills put mechanical power generation on an empirical, scientific footing for the first time. Smeaton's tests, conducted with scale models and published in a landmark 1759 paper for the Royal Society, established that overshot waterwheels, where water falls onto the wheel from above, converted a much higher share of the water's energy into useful work than undershot wheels driven only by the current striking paddles from below, findings that guided mill design for the following century. He is also remembered for designing the third Eddystone Lighthouse and developing an improved hydraulic cement used in its construction, and for making early improvements to the atmospheric steam engine Thomas Newcomen had introduced decades earlier, improvements James Watt himself later drew upon.