William Bindon Blood

William Bindon Blood (20 January 181731 January 1894) was an Irish civil engineer.

Life

He was born on the family estate in Cranagher, near Ennis in County Clare, to Bindon Blood (1775–1855) and his second wife Harriet Bagot (1780–1835).

Bindon Blood went to secondary school in Edinburgh before returning to Ireland and earning a BA (and Gold Medal) in mathematics at Trinity College Dublin (TCD) in 1838. That degree had been introduced in 1835, and engineering wasn't introduced at TCD until a few years later.

His career was spent as an engineer, first on railways in the south of Scotland starting in 1840. He died of acute bronchitis, at Cranagher, in 1894, having survived three assassination attempts a few years earlier. Following Margaret's early death in 1849, and his return to Ireland and taking up of the Queen's College Galway professorship in 1850, W. Bindon Blood remarried, in 1855, this time in Dublin to Maria Augusta Persse (1830–1860), daughter of Robert Henry Persse and Katharine Isabella Seymour. The couple had 2 children, Maria also dying by age 30.

He was a pioneer in the early days of cycling, and patented a popular lightweight 'Dublin tricycle' in 1876.