Fleeming Jenkin

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Fleeming Jenkin

Henry Charles Fleeming Jenkin (born March 25, 1833 at Dungeness , † June 12, 1885 in Edinburgh ) was a British electrical engineer.

Life

His parents were Captain Charles Jenkin and Henrietta Camilla, b. Jackson. His mother moved with him to Barjarg in the south of Scotland. He attended school in Jedburgh , Scottish Borders and then the Edinburgh Academy . His classmates included James Clerk Maxwell and Peter Guthrie Tait . After his father's retirement in 1847, the family moved to Frankfurt am Main and the following year to Paris, where he witnessed the February Revolution . The Jenkins then moved to Genoa , where they saw another revolution. Here he attended university, learned electromagnetism from Professor Padre Bancalari and earned his master's degree. In 1850 he worked in a locomotive workshop under Philip Taylor from Marseille. After his aunt Anna died in 1851, the family moved back to Manchester, where he worked for William Fairbairn's firm, Fairbairn Works . On his behalf, he checked the technical systems of the Swiss Federal Railways from 1851 to 1855. After leaving Fairbairns, he prepared an appraisal for the proposed Lukmanier railway in Switzerland. In 1856 he started as a draftsman at Penn's engineering works in Greenwich . Shortly thereafter, he moved to Liddell & Gordon as a railroad engineer , where he was involved in the development, manufacture and installation of underwater telegraph cables. In 1857 he became an engineer at RS Newall & Co. in Gateshead , who laid the first transatlantic cable with Glass, Elliott & Co. from Greenwich.

In the spring of 1855 he equipped the SS Elba in Birkenhead . In early 1859 he met Sir William Thomson , his future friend and partner. From 1861 he researched with him on the applicability of gutta-percha as a cable core insulation and on the electrical resistance of deep-sea telegraph cables. He described measuring methods for precise resistance measurements and advocated the worldwide introduction of the unit of measurement ohm. Cromwell Fleetwood Varley became another partner in marketing their telegraphic instruments.

In 1861 he left Newall & Co. and entered into a partnership with HC Forde. Forde worked for the British government on the Malta-Alexandria cable. However, business was bad. In February 1859 he had married Annie Austin. After their first son was born in 1863, they moved to Claygate near Esher . In 1866 he became a professor at University College London . In 1867 he criticized Darwin's theory. In 1868 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh .

He invented a regulator, a flow control valve for water hydraulics, which Maxwell named in On Governors in 1868 . By 1869 he was friends with his student Robert Louis Stevenson . Around 1878, James Alfred Ewing worked for him on telegraph cable laying expeditions, including in Brazil. In 1882, Jenkin invented an electric conveyor belt for cable production.

“Our honored member, Professor Fleeming Jenkin, was born on December 12th. M., too early for science, in the best of manhood, comparatively young, namely at the age of 52 in London, different from blood poisoning. Fleeming Jenkin enjoyed a universal education, which his father, a ship captain in the English navy, brought him to the schools of Great Britain, Germany and France. No matter how varied his works were in the most varied fields of technical activity, he got his finest laurels for his work in the field of electrical engineering. When this word was not even known, the deceased was already working to spread the application of the doctrine of electricity in a manner worthy of his fatherland and his great talent. In 1857 he was entrusted with the supervision of the electrical tests on the first Atlantic cable at Newall in Birkenhead . His “Cantor Lectures” on this subject are almost unmatched models of popular representation of the processes of submarine telegraphy, which were still difficult to understand at the time. In the related work he had a great comrade, Sir William Thomson , with whom he invented an automatic device for cable telegraphy, the "curb transmitter" and - as one might think - ingeniously executed it. […] Professor Fleeming Jenkin dedicated his last activity in the electrical field to telpherage , of which invention we repeatedly reported in these papers and to which we shall return later. In the midst of this work, to which he devoted all his energy and all the resources of his rich mind, death surprised the tireless. His family, a widow and three sons mourn his coffin; but with her, his country and the whole scientific world mourn for the man who died prematurely, as far as the teachings of physics and mechanics affect them.

- Obituary in the magazine for electrical engineering

Works

literature

Web links

Commons : Fleeming Jenkin  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ http://philosci24.unibe.ch/bib2lib/pdf/Vorlesungen/philobio_rsvl8/philobio_rsvl8.pdf  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / philosci24.unibe.ch  
  2. ^ Fellows Directory. Biographical Index: Former RSE Fellows 1783–2002. (PDF file) Royal Society of Edinburgh, accessed December 24, 2019 .
  3. ↑ http://doku.b.tu-harburg.de/volltexte/2008/426/pdf/S0001114.pdf p. 10
  4. ^ JC Maxwell: On Governors . In: Proceedings of the Royal Society . No. 100, 1868, digitized
  5. ↑ Fleeming Jenkin. :  Journal for electrical engineering / Journal for electrical engineering. Organ of the Elektrotechnisches Verein (e) s in Vienna , year 1885, p. 396 (online at ANNO ).Template: ANNO / Maintenance / zfe

Remarks

  1. ↑ An electric cable car, see descriptions:
personal data
SURNAME Jenkin, Fleeming
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Jenkin, Henry Charles Fleeming (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British electrical engineer
DATE OF BIRTH March 25, 1833
PLACE OF BIRTH at Dungeness
DATE OF DEATH June 12, 1885
Place of death Edinburgh