A Historically Important Membership Medal Belonging to Thomas Telford, silver membership medal embossed to one side ‘ROYAL SOCIETY EDINBURGH INSTITUTED 1783’ and engraved on the other side ‘THOs TELFORD 1803’ , Telford was elected a member of the Royal Society of Edinburgh on the 31st January 1803 Thomas Telford FRS, FRSE (9 August 1757 – 2 September 1834) was a Scottish civil engineer, architect and stonemason, and road, bridge and canal builder. After establishing himself as an engineer of road and canal projects in Shropshire, he designed numerous infrastructure projects in his native Scotland, as well as harbours and tunnels. Such was his reputation as a prolific designer of highways and related bridges, he was dubbed The Colossus of Roads (a pun on the Colossus of Rhodes), and, reflecting his command of all types of civil engineering in the early 19th century, he was elected as the first President of the Institution of Civil Engineers, a post he held for 14 years until his death