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PADDON, John Birch (1825–1910), gas and civil engineer, was born on 27 May 1825 at Ilfracombe in Devon to John Paddon, a mariner, and his wife, Elizabeth, and by the age of 15 was apprenticed to a ‘tinman’, presumably tinsmith. Since tin was used extensively in the early period of the gas industry, particularly for dry gas meters, which had cases made of tinplate, and for wet meters with their complex rotating drums made of block tin, this was perhaps how Paddon got his start in gas engineering.

At some point he moved to London and the early part of his career was spent as a manufacturer of gas apparatus. He took out his first patent on 18 October 1849 (No. 12814), for improvements to the wet gas meter, in conjunction with David Hulett, later of Kirkham, Hulett & Chandler, already established as a designer and manufacturer of gas apparatus. It was primarily intended to prevent the fraudulent abstraction of gas but also provided a regulator, or governor, where a column of mercury was used instead of water to control the flow of gas to maintain a uniform pressure through the burners. It was a compact device, suitable both for street lamps and for private premises, and proved very successful, winning a medal at the Great Exhibition of 1851. The two men seem not to have collaborated again and certainly by the end of 1850, Paddon was established in a partnership with Walter Ford trading under the name, Paddon and Ford, at Brownlow Mews, Gray's Inn Road, London. In 1858 Paddon took out a patent (No. 892) for an improved regulator with the innovative feature of a magnetised conical steel valve enclosed in a soft iron case, exploiting the attraction of the valve and its case to control the action of the exceptionally large leather diaphragm, preventing oscillation on sudden pressure changes. A further patent of 1860 was for coke ovens (No. 3395). In 1889 he took out a final patent for destroying town and country refuse (No. 4411).