William Charles Kernot
(1845-1909)
Kernot was the first qualified engineer to be produced by the University
of Melbourne and its foundation Professor of Engineering. He entered
the University at 15, graduating with an MA and Certificate of Civil
Engineering in 1866. From 1865 to 1875 he was unhappily employed in
various Victorian government departments declaring, as Murray-Smith
informs us in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, that his colleagues
"were perfectly unconscious even of the existence of physical laws".
He was employed part-time at the University before being appointed Professor
of Engineering in 1882, the first alumnus to be awarded a Chair. As
well as teaching for 23 hours a week, Kernot undertook significant contracts
and consultancies. He chaired two prize juries and was a member of a
third for the International Exhibition of 1880. He reported to the Tasmanian
government on railway bridges in the Derwent valley and the Victorian
government on placing telephone and telegraph wires underground. He
was a member of the 1884 NSW Royal Commission on Railway Bridges.
The University was not Kernot's sole concern. He was active in professional
organisations, chaired the Royal Society of Victoria from 1885 to 1900
and the Council of the Working Men's College, with which he retained
a lifelong involvement, from 1889.
Both College and University benefited from his generosity. He provided
£2000 for University scholarships in Physics and Chemistry in
1887, £200 for one in Geology in 1908 and £1000 for a metallurgical
laboratory. To the College he gave £300 for a foundry in 1893,
followed by £300 in 1901. In 1886 he won bipartisan acclaim for
his chairmanship of the Board of Arbitrators in the waterfront strike.
As Chairman of Directors of the New Australian Electricity Co, he brought
electric light to Melbourne.
Kernot was obliged to defend himself at the 1902-04 Royal Commission
on the University against accusations of superficiality and lack of
mathematical and analytical rigour in his lectures. It is clear that
he could be equally devastating in response. Despite this criticism,
Kernot is recognised as having laid strong foundations for Engineering
at the University of Melbourne.
