Notable Members
IESIS has had close links with many of the Giants of Scottish Engineering Innovation.
Past presidents include William Macquorn Rankine, Walter Montgomerie Neilson and Robert Stephenson and Early Honorary Members were Lord Kelvin, James Prescott Joule, R Clausius and Henry Besemer.
John Logie Baird 1888-1946
Scottish Electrical Engineer who pioneered television. in 1925 he gave the first public demonstration of television and in 1926 pioneered fibre optics, radar and noctovision, a system for seeing at night using infrared rays.
http://www.tvdawn.com/tvhist1.htm#Baird
Lord Kelvin 1824-1907
William Thomson, who became Lord Kelvin of Largs (Scotland) in 1892, was one of Great Britain's foremost scientists and inventors. He published more than 650 scientific papers and patented some 70 inventions. He is known for developing a temperature scale in which -273.15° C (-459.67° F) is absolute zero. The scale is known as the absolute, or Kelvin, temperature scale.
William John MacQuorn Rankine 1820-1872
Macquorn Rankine was born in Edinburgh, the son of an engineer. He studied for two years at Edinburgh University, and in 1838 became a pupil of the Irish engineer John MacNeill. After completing his pupilage he continued to practise as an engineer, while conducting his own research on railway engineering, molecular physics and thermodynamics; in 1853 he was elected FRS. Rankine's work on thermodynamics, with that of Carnot and Clausius, was built upon by William Thomson in his formulation of the laws of transformation and equivalence. In 1855 Rankine was appointed Professor of Engineering and Mechanics at Glasgow University.
Rankine's contribution to the development of a systematic programme of training for engineers was enormous. He campaigned vigorously for the introduction of a Certificate of Proficiency in Engineering Science, and after its introduction at Glasgow in 1863 he pressed for a B.Sc. degree, which was introduced shortly after his death in 1872. He was an excellent teacher, who emphasised the "mutual dependence and harmony between sound theory and good practice", and he was responsible for establishing the University's famous "sandwich courses" in co-operation with leading industrialists in Scotland. As well as over 150 scientific papers, he wrote engineering textbooks and manuals which became standard works of reference for students around the world. His stated aim, "the advancement of science as applied to practice in the mechanical arts", was pursued in all his work as an engineering scientist and teacher.
Rankine has been described as "the father of engineering science in this country" in recognition of his achievements both as a theoretical scientist and as an educator. He was the first President of the Institution of Engineers in Scotland.
http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Rankine.html
James Prescott Joule 1818-1899
James Prescott Joule was born in Manchester in 1818. He established the principal of conservation of energy and the equivalence of heat and other forms of energy. By 1840 he had established Joule's Law having discovered that the rate of heat generation rate by an electric circuit was proportional to the square of the current multiplied by the resistance. This led him to measure the heat produced through the action of falling weights, concluding that all systems contain energy which can be converted from one form to another but the total energy of a closed system remains constant. Although much of his work involved research and experimentation, he was also an inventor and amongst his many inventions are arc welding and the displacement pump.
Robert Stephenson 1803-1859
Robert Stephenson, the notable railway and bridge engineer was born in 1803. His father, George, was and enginewright at the local colliery. In 1823 Robert Stephenson joined with his father, Michael Longdridge and Edward Pease to form the world's first locomotive building company, Robert Stephenson & Company. His engineering talent was demonstrated in his design of the ‘Rocket' for the Rainhill trials in 1829. The company built many locomotives for various Railway companies. In 1833 he was appointed chief engineer of the London & Birmingham Line. The line was completed in 1838 and was the first into London. In addition to building railways, he also built a number of noted bridges including the Menai Straits Bridge, the Britannia Bridge at Conway, and a bridge over the St Lawrence at Montreal, Canada.
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/RAstephensonR.htm
James Beaumont Neilson 1792-1862
Invented the hot blast oven, which was a great advance in the iron industry. His process reduced the amount of coal needed to produce iron, and greatly increased efficiency to satisfy the demands of the railway and shipbuilding industries.
http://ossian.geo.ed.ac.uk/home/scotland/greatscots.html
James Watt 1736-1819
Scottish engineer who developed the steam engine. He made Thomas Newcomen's steam engine vastly more efficient by cooling the used steam in a condenser separate from the main cylinder, allowing the main cylinder to remain hot.
Steam engines incorporating governors, sun-and-planet gears, and other devices of his invention were successfully built by him in partnership with Matthew Boulton and were vital in the Industrial Revolution.
He also developed a chemical way to copy documents and introduced the term "horsepower". The metric unit of power is named in his honour.
http://www.history.rochester.edu/steam/carnegie/
http://www.history.rochester.edu/steam/marshall/
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Acropolis/6914/watte.htm