He was born on 26 April 1869 in
Wolverton in
Buckinghamshire the son of George Coker, an engine-fitter, and his wife, Sarah Tompkins. His birthplace is often wrongly stated as
Wolverhampton. He was educated at a private school at
Stony Stratford. In 1890 he won a
Whitworth Scholarship allowing him to study at the Royal College of Science in London and then both the
University of Edinburgh and
Peterhouse, Cambridge where he graduated with a Mechanical Sciences Tripos in 1896. His early jobs included Assistant Examiner of Patents at H M Patent Office in London. In 1898 he won the post of Assistant Professor of Civil Engineering at
McGill University in
Montreal. Coker returned to Britain, and in 1901 he received a DSc from the
University of Edinburgh. In 1905 he took the role of Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mathematics at
Finsbury Technical College, then in 1914 got the chair in Civil and Mechanical Engineering at
University College, London (now UCL). He received honorary doctorates from three universities:
Edinburgh,
Sydney and Louvain. In 1903 he was elected a Fellow of the
Royal Society of Edinburgh and 1916 a Fellow of the
Royal Society of London. In 1921 he was awarded a
Telford Medal by the
Institution of Civil Engineers and in 1922, in recognition of his work on the photo-elastic method of measuring stress, a
Howard N. Potts gold medal for physics by the
Franklin Institute. In 1924 he was an Invited Speaker of the
ICM in Toronto. He retired in 1934 and became President of the Whitworth Society a year later in 1935. ==Family==