Sir Joshua Jebb, was a British officer of the Royal Engineers who participated in the Battle of Plattsburgh on Lake Champlain during the War of 1812, He became Surveyor-General of convict prisons. By 1850, Pentonville Prison which he had designed had become a template for prison construction across the British Empire. Michael Ignatieff described Pentonville as "the culmination of a history of efforts to devise a perfectly rational and reformative mode of imprisonment".

The Corps of Royal Engineers, usually called the Royal Engineers (RE), and commonly known as the Sappers, is the engineering arm of the British Army. It provides military engineering and other technical support to the British Armed Forces and is headed by the Chief Royal Engineer. The Corps Headquarters and the Royal School of Military Engineering are in Chatham in Kent, England. The corps is divided into several regiments, barracked at various places in the United Kingdom and around the world.