One of the most celebrated civil engineers of the nineteenth century - the age of iron and steel.

Trained as a millwright Fairburn championed the construction of metal-framed textile mills and greatly improved the transmission of power in them. He was also a shipbuilder in London, pioneering the use of ships built of iron, and a boiler-maker at his business in Manchester. His Lancashire boiler with two firetubes was a major advance in boiler design. Fairbairn was largely responsible for the acceptance of long-span wrought-iron tubular railway bridges, notably the Conwy and Menai bridges. The latter opened in 1850.