John Bradfield (1867-1943), engineer, was a key figure in the development of the Sydney Harbour Bridge and inner city transport network. A brilliant student, recipient of many awards, Bradfield was educated in Queensland and at the University of Sydney before starting work with the NSW Department of Public Works, with which he became an assistant engineer in 1909. In the prewar years he was involved with the construction of the Cataract Dam and the Burrinjuck Dam. From the turn of the century he had been interested in the construction of the bridge across Sydney Harbour; during World War I he began to investigate options for a metropolitan rail system and suburban electrification. In 1922 the Harbour Bridge Act was passed, with Bradfield advising on the wording of the bill so that his subsequent decisions on the form of the bridge could be accommodated. In 1924 he received the first DSc in engineering awarded by the University of Sydney for his thesis, The city and suburban electric railways and the Sydney Harbour Bridge. In 1926, the new St James Station, Museum Station and a new section of Central Station opened as a result of ambitious plans for the city he had formulated a decade earlier. From 1929 onwards, there was some controversy over whether he, consulting engineer Ralph Freeman or Lawrence Ennis could properly be called the 'designer' of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, which opened in 1932; various informed parties made authoritative pronouncements both for and against Bradfield. The issue has never been settled, but the bridge highway is named after Bradfield. Through the 1930s he was responsible for the design, fabrication and construction of the Story Bridge across the Brisbane River, an advisor on the Hornibrook Highway project and a planner and designer of aspects of the St Lucia site of the University of Queensland. A founder of the Institution of Engineers, he held a number of administrative posts at the University of Sydney, of which he was Deputy Chancellor from 1942. He was awarded Sydney's Peter Nicol Russell Medal, Melbourne's Kernot Memorial Medal and the Telford Gold Medal of the Institution of Civil Engineers, London and held an honorary doctorate from the University of Queensland.
