Watanabe, Kaichi

Milestones

Birth: March 22 1858 – Asahi Village, Shinano, Japan

Death: December 04 1922 – Tokyo

Short Life Summary

Kaichi Watanabe’s strong and enduring connection to Scotland is as a Scottish-educated Japanese engineer and construction foreman on the development of the ‘eighth wonder of the world’, the iron marvel bridging the Queensferrys, between March of 1886 and August of 1887. He is pictured between two bridge engineers, demonstrating the cantilever principle of the Forth Bridge.

Born in 1858, Watanabe studied engineering at the Imperial College of Technology in Tokyo, then took up a job as a railway engineer; he subsequently came to Glasgow University (connected with the great technical educator in Japan, Henry Dyer) to take a degree in Civil Engineering, graduating in 1886. This was impressive enough – to achieve a Bachelor of Science, in a foreign tongue! – but Watanabe was taken on by the firm of Fowler & Baker to serve on the construction of the much-anticipated Forth Bridge. His cantilever-principle picture places him at the heart of the construction process, both as a trained engineer and a young man passionate about hands-on engineering.

Watanabe returned to Japan for a subsequent glittering engineering career, but is best known here for his memorable contribution to the Forth Bridge – a lasting physical, and visual, legacy.

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