Protestant Exiles from France/Volume 2 - Book Third - Chapter 25 - Vignoles
Vignoles. — A refugee branch of the Vignoles family received from the British Crown an estate in Florida, which the Americans confiscated. Captain Charles Henry Vignoles of the 43rd Light Infantry, represented this branch in the latter years of last century. His wife was a daughter of Charles Hutton, LL.D., the eminent mathematical professor at Woolwich. Their son, Charles Blacker Vignoles, was born at Woodbrook, in the county of Wexford, on 31st May 1792. When the Captain’s regiment was ordered to the West Indies, his wife and child accompanied him. But in 1794 the gallant officer died of wounds received at the storming of Pointe-a-Pitre, on the east side of the island of Guadaloupe. Mrs Vignoles survived him only a week, and their orphan son was a prisoner at war. Lieutenant-General Sir Charles Grey forthwith gazetted the child as an ensign in the 43rd regiment, and put him on half-pay; and as a British officer he was set at liberty and delivered to his uncle, Captain (afterwards General) Hutton. On his arrival in England, young Vignoles was educated by his grandfather, who at first destined him for the bar, but in 1811 he was transferred from a lawyer’s office to the Royal Military Academy of Sandhurst. His name had continued in the list of ensigns in his regiment, and he was ordered to the seat of war in the Spanish Peninsula, and he was present at the battle of Vittoria on 21st June 1813. He was transferred to the First Royals, or Royal Scots, and on the 14th March 1814 he held a flag of truce on the ramparts of Bergen-op-Zoom, and the top of the flag-staff was shot away by a musket-ball. In the summer he was ordered to Canada. Returning to England after Waterloo, he was promoted to be lieutenant and quartered at Fort-William. General Sir Thomas Brisbane, having been informed of his scientific tastes, appointed him an extra aide-de-camp, and he joined the General at Valenciennes in May 1816. This ended his military career.
Mr. Vignoles married in 1817, and sailed for America, in the hope of recovering the family estate. In this he was disappointed, but was employed profitably in surveying the country for about five years. He returned to England in 1822, and began his career as a Civil Engineer. He was engaged in the construction of railways in almost every kingdom of Europe; it was he who surveyed the line between Liverpool and Manchester in 1824. He was engineer-in-chief of the first Irish railway — Dublin and Kingstown, — which was opened in December 1834. He invented the Vignoles rail. In 1847, and the five following years, he was chief engineer to the Emperor of Russia, and constructed the Suspension Bridge at Kieff, over the river Dnieper, the longest of its kind in the world. He was also engineer-in-chief to the Emperor of Brazil and the Queen of Spain. He became F.R.S. in 1855, and was an active member of the British Association and the Royal Astronomical Society. He was in Spain in 1860 when the British Astronomical expedition arrived to observe the total eclipse of the sun, and he provided a map of the shadow thrown by the eclipse. He was one of a similar expedition in 1870. In December 1869 he had been elected President of the Institution of Civil Engineers; his Presidential Address, delivered in 1870, is an admirable compendium of the antiquities and cotemporary history of civil engineering. Mr. Vignoles died at his marine residence near Southampton, on 17th November 1875, aged eighty three. (See a printed Memoir of Charles Blacker Vignoles, extracted from Minutes of Proceedings, Inst. C.E.)