George Frederick Deacon was an English

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

 Civil Engineer

Civil engineer

A civil engineer is a person who practices civil engineering; the application of planning, designing, constructing, maintaining, and operating infrastructures while protecting the public and environmental health, as well as improving existing infrastructures that have been neglected.Originally, a...

. He was a pupil and lifelong friend of William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin

William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin

William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin OM, GCVO, PC, PRS, PRSE, was a mathematical physicist and engineer. At the University of Glasgow he did important work in the mathematical analysis of electricity and formulation of the first and second laws of thermodynamics, and did much to unify the emerging...

. He was Lord Kelvin's assistant on the SS Great Eastern

SS Great Eastern

SS Great Eastern was an iron sailing steam ship designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, and built by J. Scott Russell & Co. at Millwall on the River Thames, London. She was by far the largest ship ever built at the time of her 1858 launch, and had the capacity to carry 4,000 passengers around the...

 cable-laying expedition. He was both borough engineer and water engineer to Liverpool

Liverpool

Liverpool is a city and metropolitan borough of Merseyside, England, along the eastern side of the Mersey Estuary. It was founded as a borough in 1207 and was granted city status in 1880...

 from 1871 to 1880, and water engineer to the city from 1880 to 1890. During this latter period jointly with Thomas Hawksley

Thomas Hawksley

Thomas Hawksley was an English civil engineer of the 19th century, particularly associated with water and gas engineering projects.The son of John Hawksley and Mary Whittle, and born in Arnold, near Nottingham on , Hawksley was largely self-taught from the age of 15 onwards, having at that point...

 he designed the Lake Vyrnwy

Lake Vyrnwy

Lake Vyrnwy Nature Reserve and Estate is an area of land in Montgomeryshire, Powys, Wales, surrounding the Victorian reservoir of Lake Vyrnwy. Its stone-built dam, built in the 1880s, was the first of its kind in the world. The Nature Reserve and the area around it are jointly managed by the Royal...

 scheme to supply Liverpool's water. In 1890 he established a consultancy in Westminster

Westminster

Westminster is an area of central London, within the City of Westminster, England. It lies on the north bank of the River Thames, southwest of the City of London and southwest of Charing Cross...

 which designed waterworks for many UK towns. This merged with another firm to become Alexander Binnie

Alexander Binnie

Sir Alexander Richardson Binnie was a civil engineer responsible for several major engineering projects, including several associated with crossings of the River Thames in London....

 & Sons, Deacon.

Amongst his inventions were the Deacon waste-water meter to locate water leakage, and electrical meters to measure river flow.

At the time of his death he was working on a scheme to provide water to Birkenhead

Birkenhead

Birkenhead is a town within the Metropolitan Borough of Wirral in Merseyside, England. It is on the Wirral Peninsula, along the west bank of the River Mersey, opposite the city of Liverpool...

 from the River Alwen

Alwen Reservoir

The Alwen Reservoir or Cronfa Alwen is a 5km long reservoir near Pentre-Llyn-Cymmer in the county borough of Conwy, North Wales, held back by the 27 metre high Alwen Dam. It impounds the Afon Alwen, and the dam is 8km downstream from Llyn Alwen. It was built between 1909 and 1921, originally to...

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