Sir W. Pulteney, member for Shrewsbury, who conceived such a high opinion of his talents that he got him made surveyor of public works for the county of Salop. His earliest bridge was that across the Severn at Montford, finished in 1792. In the following year he was appointed engineer of the Ellesmere Canal, which led to his being employed for the chief canals subsequently constructed in Great Britain, including the Caledonian (1804), the Gloucester and Berkeley (1818), the Grand Trunk (1822), the Macclesfield (1824), and the Birmingham and Liverpool Junction (1825). He was consulted in 1806 by the king of Sweden regarding the construction of the Gotha Canal between Lake Wener and the Baltic, and, his plans having been adopted, he visited the country in 1810 to superintend some of the more important excavations. In 1803 he had been appointed engineer for the construction of 920 miles of roads in the Highlands of Scotland, a great part through very difficult country. Of the numerous bridges built in this line of roads mention may be specially made of that across the Tay at Dunkeld. Subsequently he perfected the road communication between London and Scotland and the northern towns of England. An undertaking of equal magnitude and importance with that in the Highlands of Scotland was a system of roads through the more inaccessible parts of Wales, which involved the erection of the magnificent suspension bridge across the Menai Straits, begun in 1820, and the Conway bridge, begun in 1822. For the Austrian Government Telford built the Polish road from Warsaw to Brest. While the fame of Telford rests chiefly on his road and canal engineering, and the erection of the numerous bridges and aqueducts which this involved, he also did good work in harbour construction. In 1790 he was employed by the British Fishery Society to inspect the harbours on the north-east coast of Scotland; and, besides constructing the important fishing harbour at Pulteneytown, Wick, he greatly improved those at the other principal fishing stations. His important works of this kind were, however, his improvement of the harbours at Aberdeen and Dundee, and the construction of the St Katherine’s docks at London. In 1828–30 he drained the north level of the eastern Fen district, an area of 48,000 acres. The erection of the Dean Bridge, Edinburgh, and of the Broomielaw Bridge, Glasgow, and the improvement (1833–34) of Dover harbour were the principal achievements of his later years. He died on 2d September 1834, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.
Telford was never married. Tor twenty-one years he lived at the Salopian coffee house, afterwards the Ship Hotel, Charing Cross. He was a fellow of the Royal Societies of London and of Edinburgh, and was annually elected president of the Institution of Civil Engineers from its commencement. He received the Swedish order of knighthood “of Gustavus Vasa."}}
See Telford's Memoirs, written by himself and edited by John Rickman (1838); also Smiles’s Lives of the Engineers.
TELL.The story of William Tell’s skill in shooting at and striking the apple which had been placed on the head of his little son by order of Gessler, the tyrannical Austrian bailiff of Uri, is so closely bound up with the legendary history of the origin of the Swiss Confederation that they must be considered together. Both appear first in the 15th century, probably as results of the war for the Toggenburg inheritance (1436–50); for the intense hatred of Austria, greatly increased by her support of the claims of Zurich, favoured the circulation of stories which assumed that Swiss freedom was of immemorial antiquity, while, as the war was largely a struggle between the civic and rural elements in the Confederation, the notion that the (rural) Schwyzers were of Scandinavian descent at once separated them from and raised them above the German inhabitants of the towns.
The Tell story is first found in a ballad the first nine stanzas of which (containing the story) were certainly written before 1474. There is no mention made of the names of the bailiff or of his master, or of the hat placed on a pole. Tell is called "the first Confederate," and his feat is treated as the real and only reason why the Confederation was formed and the tyrants driven out of the land. It is probably to this ballad that Melchior Russ of Lucerne (who began his Chronicle in 1482) refers when, in his account (from Justinger) of the evil deeds of the bailiffs in the Forest districts, he excuses himself from giving the story. He goes on to narrate how Tell, irritated by his treatment, stirred up his friends against the governor, who seized and bound him and was conveying him by boat to his castle on the Lake of Lucerne, when a storm arose, and Tell, by reason of his great bodily strength, was, after being unbound, given charge of the rudder on his promise to bring the boat safely to land. He steers it towards a shelf of rock, called in Russ’s time Tell’s Platte, springs on shore, shoots the bailiff dead with his crossbow, and goes back to Uri, where he stirs up the great strife which ended in the battle of Morgarten. In these two accounts, which form the basis of the Uri version of the origin of the Confederation, it is Tell and Tell only who is the actor and the leader. We first hear of the cruelties of Austrian bailiffs in the Forest districts in the Bernese Chronicle of Conrad Justinger (1420). No names or details are given, and the dates are different in the two recensions of the Chronicle as "olden days before Bern was founded" (i.e., before 1191) and 1260, Several details, but only one name, are added in the De Nobilitate et Rusticitate Dialogus (cap. 33) of Felix Hemmerlin, a canon of Zurich, who wrote it after 1451 and before 1454; in this last year he was imprisoned by the Schwyzers, wdiom he had repeatedly insulted and attacked in his books. According to him, the men of Schwyz and of Unterwalden were the first to rise, those of Uri following suit much later. But neither Justinger nor Hemmerlin makes any allusion to Tell or his feat.
The Tell story and the "atrocities" story are first found combined in a MS. known as the White Book of Sarnen. They are contained in a short chronicle written between 1467 and 1476, probably about 1470, and based on oral tradition. Many details are given of the oppressions of the bailiffs: we hear of Gessler, of the meeting of Stoupacher of Schwyz, Fürst of Uri, and a man of Nidwald at the Rütli, — in fact, the usual version of the legend. To give an instance of tyranny in Uri, the author tells us the story of the refusal of "der Thäll" to do reverence to the hat placed on a pole, of his feat of skill, and of his shooting the bailiff, Gessler, from behind a bush in the "hollow way" near Küssnacht. Tell is represented as being one of those who swore at the Rütli to drive out the oppressors; but the narrative of his doings is merely one incident in the general movement which began quite independently of him. The chronology is very confused, but the events are placed after Rudolph’s election to the empire in 1273. This is the only account in which Tell is called "der Thäll," which name he himself explains by saying, “If I were sharp (witzig) I should be called something else and not der Tall," i.e., the simpleton or slow-witted man. The only other known instances of the Uri version of the legend relating to the origin of the Confederation are the Latin hexameters of Glareanus (1515), in which Tell is compared to Brutus as "assertor patriæ, vindex ultorque tyrannum," and the Urnerspiel (composed in 1511–12), a play acted in Uri, in which Russ’s version is followed, though the bailiff, who is unnamed, but announces that he has been sent by Albert of Austria, is slain in the "hollow way." Tell is the chief of the Rütli leaguers, and it is his deed which is the immediate occasion of the rising against the oppressors, which is dated in 1296. Mutius
