Benjamin Robins

Benjamin Robins (* 1707 in Bath , † July 29, 1751 in Cuddalore ) was a British military engineer, mathematician and scientist with a broad interest. He started as an amateur researcher and became one of the founders of scientific ballistics .

Robins was born into a poor family and was the son of Quakers , the father was a tailor. Robins was self-taught , he did not attend university, and there was no evidence of going to school in Bath. But Henry Pemberton noticed his mathematical talent and advised him to go to London. Pemberton, who was then working on the new edition of Newton's Principia , provided Robins with mathematical literature both to ancient mathematicians such as Archimedes , Apollonius and Pappos , who left him with a taste for geometry, and to contemporary mathematics such as Fermat and Newton. In 1727 he published his first treatise in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society , and in the same year he was elected to the Royal Society . In 1728 he attracted attention when he criticized the theory of the collisions of elastic bodies by Johann I Bernoulli . From then on he was able to earn his living as a private math teacher in London, who prepared future students at Cambridge University. Soon he also worked as a civil engineer (draining wetlands, harbors, mills, bridges). In addition, he devoted himself to studies of military technology, the installation of fortifications and ballistics and visited fortifications in what is now Belgium and the Netherlands. Among other things, he invented the ballistic pendulum for measuring the speed of projectiles, examined the air resistance on projectiles (for example in treatises 1746, 1747) and quantified the explosive power of gunpowder in internal ballistics. Above all, he systematically checked his calculations and predictions through experiments. His seminal book New Principles of Gunnery was published in 1742 - which may have been written to put those in the wrong who overlooked him when filling the professorship at the newly established Royal Military Academy in Woolwich. The book also addresses the benefits of drawn barrels. The book was translated into German by the famous mathematician Leonhard Euler and provided with his own commentary (1745), and a French translation also appeared. The book is considered to be one of the first works in which Isaac Newton's mechanics is applied to concrete engineering problems.

In a treatise from 1750 he also devoted himself to rockets with which the British had unpleasant experiences in India.

He also wrote books on calculus . In 1727 he defended Newton's analysis against attacks by George Berkeley and others ( A discourse concerning the nature and certainty of Sir Isaac Newton's method of fluxions and prime and ultimate ratios ), from which a discourse with James Jurin in the journal The present state of the Republic of Letters revealed.

Robins was also politically active, as secretary of a secret parliamentary commission that investigated the work of Prime Minister Robert Walpole after his fall in 1741, and as a member of the Tory opposition and critic of Walpole. Robins 'pamphlets against Walpole attracted attention and led to the fact that he was forced to declare war on Spain in 1739 ( War of Jenkins' Ear ).

In 1749 he became chief engineer of the British East India Company , for which he was to check and renew the fortifications in India (in Madras and Cuddalore ). In July 1750 he arrived in India. There he fell ill with a fever and died in Fort St. David near Cuddalore. Robins never married.

In 1761 his Gesammelte Werke appeared in two volumes, re-edited in 2001 by Phoenix Publishing House (with the works of Charles Hutton ).

In 1747 he received the Copley Medal of the Royal Society for his research on ballistics .

Fonts

• Robin's New Principles of Gunnery , Richmond, Surrey 1805, reprint of the first edition, London, J. Nourse 1742, edited and supplemented by Charles Hutton

literature

• BD Steele, Muskets and pendulums: Benjamin Robins, Leonhard Euler, and the ballistics revolution (1742-1753), Technology and culture, Vol. 35, 1994, pp. 348-382 (based on his dissertation at the University of Minnesota 1994 The ballistics revolution: military and scientific change from Robins to Napoléon ).

Web links

• John J. O'Connor, Edmund F. Robertson :  Benjamin Robins. In: MacTutor History of Mathematics archive .