Sankey diagrams are named after Captain Matthew Henry Phineas Riall Sankey.
Here is some biographical information on Mr. Sankey:
Matthew H. Sankey was an engineer from Ireland. He was born on November 9, 1853 in Nenagh, co. Tipperary (other sources have him being born in Modeshill, co. Tipperary or Bawnmore, co. Cork) to a family of military. His father, William, was a Lieut.-Col. in the 62nd regiment. Sankey joined the military as well and became an engineer in the Corps of Royal Engineers (R.E.) with the rank of a captain.
Later he quit military service and joined Willans works, where he continued to work on the improvement of the efficiency of steam engines.
He became am member of the Institution of Civil Engineers. From 1920 to 1921 he acted as president of the British Institution of Mechanical Engineers. (Read a biography on the IMechE website)
Sankey diagrams are named after him, because he was the first to use them in a publication: In an annex to the minutes for the Institution of Mechanical Engineers in 1898 he sketched the energy efficiency of a steam engine in comparison to an ideal steam engine without energy losses. Sankey diagrams show where material or energy flows with arrows with a width proportional to the flow quantity.
His publications include “The Maps of the Ordnance Survey” (1888), “The Thermal Efficiency of Steam Engines” (1895), “Governing of Steam Engines by Throttling and by Variable Expansion” (1895), “Interim Report of the Committee on tabulating the Results of Steam-Engine and Boiler Trials” (1902) and “The Energy Chart. Practical Applications to Reciprocal Steam-Engines” (1905)
On July 5, 1876 he married Elisabeth Pym, they had one child. Sankey died on October 3, 1925.
RSS-Feed Entries
October 5th, 2007 at 4:38 pm
[...] always wanted to get hold of a digital version of this this energy efficiency diagram published by Captain Henry R. Sankey in 1898 in the Minutes of Proceedings of The Institution of Civil Engineers. Vol. CXXXIV, Session [...]
December 29th, 2007 at 7:50 am
I was told by my great aunt, Sankey’s grand daughter, that Sankey’s childhood home was in Bawnmore–but that Bawnmore was in Tipperary, so I guess that doesn’t solve anything. Anyway, my great aunt Elizabeth Celia also told me that the manor in England where Sankey settled with Elizabeth Pym was called Bawnmore, after the ancestral home. By the way, Sankey did not have one child, he had four: Margaret, my great grandmother, Crofton, Celia, and Joyce. Also of interest, Elizbeth Pym’s great grandmother was Australian pioneer Mary Reiby, sent to Australia for stealing a horse.
January 2nd, 2008 at 10:11 am
Thanks Gordon for this genealogical input on Mr. Sankey.
February 9th, 2008 at 11:19 am
Thanks for this very interesting blog. I discovered recently that I accidentally “reinvented” the Sankey wheel quite awhile ago for a rather odd usage: political party ebb and flow in E. Europe. As with energy, the number of party seats in parliament is a closed system and there are flows from some to others. This is a highly modified usage, of course, as we do not know in a precise way “where” votes go from one election to the next, so we just fudge at the day of election and just start over (or have invisible reallocations). I’ve posted an example on my blog (for the moment at: pozorblog.wordpress.com ) and I’m wondering if we could be in contact. Have you seen anything that resembles an on-line option, anything like Google’s chart API or some kind of java app that would allow this (I’ve spoken to the guys at Weimar and they are not quite ready for online prime-time yet). What I would like to do is find an easy (free) app that a bunch of us studying different countries could use to coordinate our efforts and ultimately include in, say, wikipedia. You can find my email address in the comment section or go to http://www.la.wayne.edu/polisci/kdk
I look forward to hearing from you.
February 19th, 2008 at 10:26 pm
Hi Kevin,
thanks for your interesting comment! I like your idea very much, and have dedicated my latest post to it:
http://www.sankey-diagrams.com/a-different-power-sankey-diagram/
As for your question regarding the API: I am not aware of any application available for such a purpose. However, this sounds like a good idea, and I would like to discuss with you further the potential uses and benefits of such an app.
Phineas
July 25th, 2008 at 9:28 am
interesting to hear about distant relatives
All i know for fact is my family came from Tipperary Co. In Coolmore 
And that the Sankeys in Ireland got there from a man named Jerome Sankey who was a Officer in the english army and was knighted while in Ireland and ended up staying in Ireland.
This website has alot of the Ireland sankeys history
http://www.sankey.ws/sankeya.html
http://www.sankey.ws/sankey.html
October 23rd, 2008 at 10:18 pm
cool! how do i find out if he is related to me though!?
November 4th, 2008 at 6:44 pm
Jole and Chris,
thanks for visiting.
http://www.sankey.ws/irishtree.html has a list of the Sankey from Tipperary Co., and that branch of the family is where Cpt. Riall Sankey belongs to (find him under 5-I-(1)-i). You might want to contact John Sankey the owner of the website.
Also there is a Sankey family board at rootsweb:
http://boards.rootsweb.com/surnames.sankey/mb.ashx where you can post a query. Another, similar family board, mainly used by people in the U.S. is at
http://genforum.genealogy.com/sankey/
Enjoy researching you family roots!
PHineas
March 11th, 2009 at 8:37 pm
Interesting that he joined a dead body of military engineers. Did his activities revive the corpse, I wonder?
March 12th, 2009 at 9:33 am
@Ian: thanks for your very subtle hint. I removed the typo.