James N. McAdam "Colossus of Roads"

James Nicholl McAdam, the "Colossus of Roads", was knighted for managing turnpike trusts - a knighthood, it is said, previously offered to his father but declined.

http://www.oxforddnb.com/templates/article.jsp?articleid=17325&back=

"McAdam's second surviving son, Sir James Nicoll McAdam (1786–1852), builder and administrator of roads, was born at Sauchrie House, Ayrshire, on 9 April 1786. He married Harriet Younger, and they had at least two children. He followed a career as a government contractor, supplying the Ordnance, the Royal Military College, and other departments, for several years, until in 1817 he undertook the surveyorship of the Epsom Trust at the request of his busy father. He went on to become the surveyor to thirty-nine turnpike trusts, including the Metropolitan Trust established in 1826 (7 Geo. IV c. 142), which amalgamated fourteen London trusts north of the Thames. The new trust controlled the chief roads radiating to the north and west of the city. Although not always above criticism, he showed the same skills of professional competence in road construction and financial management as his father had done, allied to an attention to detail that enabled him personally to assemble the facts on the turnpike trusts in England and Wales presented annually to parliament from 1836. He became a distinguished professional figure in his own right and although family piety held his knighthood, granted in 1834, to be in lieu of one declined by his father, it may also have been granted on individual but overshadowed merit. The timing of the cartoon ‘Colossus of Roads’ (1827), the fact that the figure is athwart the main north and west roads into the metropolis, and that he bears a closer resemblance to the son than the father, suggest that popular sentiment may here have been referring to another talented member of the McAdam family and not their progenitor."

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The Colossus of Roads was the unofficial title bestowed on John Loudon McAdam, who dominated the world of road technology in the late 18th and 19th centuries and is caricatured in a famous print by Henry Heath. Heath drew both on his viewers’ stereotypes of Scots and on their knowledge of the lost colossal statue of the Sun which the Sun-worshipping Rhodians of the third century BC erected in their harbour to celebrate the defence of their island from Macedonian strongmen.

McAdam's innovation was to use several layers of very small stones, bound with a cementing agent, to form a crust; provided the road was built above the water table, it did not need to be raised above the pre-existing path nor be given a steep camber.

http://edithorial.blogspot.com/2014/09/the-scottish-colossus-of-roa...