Edward Alfred Cowper

Who was Edward Alfred Cowper?

Edward Alfred Cowper was a British mechanical engineer.

He was the son of Professor Edward Shickle Cowper, head of the department of engineering at King's College London and Ann Applegath. The elder Cowper, together with his brother-in-law Augustus Applegath, had helped to develop the vertical printing press in the 1820s.

In 1833, he was apprenticed to John Braithwaite, a railway engineer in London. In around 1841, he invented the detonating railway fog signal, first tried on the Croydon railway and widely used to this day as an emergency safety measure. The same year, he joined Fox, Henderson and Co, structural and railway engineers in Smethwick, where he devised a method of casting railway chairs. He oversaw the company’s contract drawings for the 1851 Exhibition Building, The Crystal Palace.

Cowper also designed the wrought-iron and glass roof of New Street Station in Birmingham, which was then the largest single-span roof in the world at 211 feet wide. It was originally intended to have three spans, supported by columns, however it was soon realised that the supporting columns would severely restrict the workings of the railway. Cowper's single-span design, was therefore adopted, even though it was some 62 feet wider than the widest roof span at that time. George Gilbert Scott praised Cowper's roof at New Street, stating “An iron roof in its most normal condition is too spider-like a structure to be handsome, but with a very little attention this defect is obviated. The most wonderful specimen, probably, is that at the great Birmingham Station . . . ”