FOWLER, SIR JOHN (1817-1898), English civil engineer, was born on July 15, 1817 at Wadsley Hall, near Sheffield, where his father was a land-surveyor. He was engaged in railway con struction from an early age, and when he set up in business for himself in 1844 he was engaged in laying out the small railway systems which eventually were amalgamated under the title of the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire railway. Fowler was engineer of the London Metropolitan railway, the pioneer of underground railways, and noteworthy in that it was mostly made, not by tunnelling, but by excavating from the surface and then covering in the permanent way; and he lived to be one of the engineers officially connected with the deep tunnelling "tube" system extensively adopted for electric railways in London. He was also engaged in the making of railways in Ireland, and in 1867 he served on a commission to consider a state-purchase of the Irish railway system. He also carried out considerable works in relation to the Nene Valley drainage and the reclama tion of land at the Norfolk estuary.
In 1865 he was elected president of the Institution of Civil Engineers, the youngest president who had ever sat in the chair. He was strongly opposed to the project of a Channel tunnel to France, and in 1872 he endeavoured, in vain, to obtain the con sent of parliament to a Channel ferry scheme. For eight years from 1871 he acted as general engineering adviser in Egypt to the Khedive Ismail. He projected a railway to the Sudan, and also the reparation of the barrage. These and many other plans came to an end owing to financial reasons. But the maps and surveys for the railway were given to the war office, and proved most useful to Lord Wolseley in his Nile expedition. For his service Fowler was made K.C.M.G. (1885). He was created a baronet in 1890 on the completion of the Forth bridge, of which with his partner Sir Benjamin Baker he was joint engineer. He died at Bournemouth on Nov. 20, 1898.