John Wigham Richardson

John Wigham Richardson (7 January 1837 – 15 April 1908) was a British shipbuilder on Tyneside during the late 19th and early 20th century. Career Richardson was born on 7 January 1837, the son of devout Quakers Edward Richardson and Jane Wigham, and grew up in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. He was educated at Bootham School, York. His nephew, Charles Merz, was a pioneer of electricity distribution in the UK and internationally conceiving the idea of a synchronised electricity grid, now common throughout the world. Although the family business was in leather tanning, he devoted his life to shipbuilding, learning his skills initially as a draughtsman for Lloyds Register of Shipping in Liverpool (in 1853) and then as an apprentice to Jonathon Robson, a steam-tug builder in Gateshead (from 1853 to 1856). In 1860, at the age of just 23, he founded the Neptune Works, often incorrectly referred to as Wigham Richardson, at Walker on Tyne, with a loan of less than £5,000 from his father. This was one of the world's first shipyards to build ships in steel, and the original steam engine on the site also provided electric lighting to the neighbourhood.