Charles Hutton Gregory

Biography

Sir Charles Hutton Gregory (14 October 1817 – 10 January 1898) was an English civil engineer. He was president of the Institution of Civil Engineers between December 1867 and December 1869.

Charles was the son of Dr Olinthus Gilbert Gregory, a master of mathematics at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich. The chair of mathematics at that time was held by Charles Hutton, who acted as Dr. Gregory's patron. It was in Hutton's honour that Charles was named.

Gregory was consulting engineer of several major railway construction works, including those in Ceylon, Trinidad, Cape Colony, Perak and Selangor. He was the first to use railway semaphore signalling which he employed first at New Cross on the London and Croydon Railway in 1841, and the South Eastern Railways in 1842-3. This method later superseded all others and was dominant from 1870. In 1882 he was a member of the Channel Tunnel Committee and in 1886 was a Royal Commissioner for the Colonial and Indian Exhibition.

With these uses in mind, he was interested in the properties of the less usual timbers. In 1886 he, in the company of other leading figures such as Sir Philip Cunliffe-Owen, Sir John Coode and Sir Frederick Bramwell, attended an exhibition at the Chelsea works of A. Ransome and Co, manufacturers of woodworking equipment. There they saw experiments on more than 40 different varieties of colonial timber, including karri wood and jarrah from Western Australia, and padouk from India.

Gregory was instrumental in furthering the careers of many fellow engineers, e.g.

Frederick George Slessor (1831-1905) -- in 1874, appointed to the staff of Cape Government Railways, first as Chief Officer of Surveys and Resident Engineer, and then Chief Resident Engineer of the Eastern system.