Engineering

The Chair of Engineering was endowed in 1868 by Sir David Baxter of Kilmaron (1793–1872).

Origins

In some respects, the Chair had a predecessor in the short-lived Chair of Technology, which was created in 1854 as a result of the university’s decision to transfer its Natural History collections to the nation. Amassed by Robert Jameson (1774-1854), these had far outgrown the university’s own museum premises. The government thus accepted a proposal from the Senatus Academicus to house the collection in a newly built Museum of Science and Art. The Professor of Natural History would remain Keeper of the strictly scientific part of the collection, but a new Regius Chair of Technology was now created, whose holder would function as Keeper of the more technological side of the Museums’ collections.

George Wilson (1818-1859) was appointed to the post and proved both an inspiring teacher and a conscientious keeper of the museum. Wilson defined technology ‘as science in its application to the useful arts’ and devised a three-year course of lectures, devoted to ‘Mineral Technology’, ‘Vegetable Technology’, and ‘Animal Technology’ respectively. ‘Mineral Technology’ encompassed lectures on fuel, building materials of mineral origin, glass and glass-making, pottery, and, most importantly, electrical engineering. Tragically, Wilson was of delicate heath and died in post in 1859. The Chair of Technology was subsequently suppressed and the curatorship of the university’s former technological collection passed out of its hands.

Within a decade, however, the growing importance of engineering studies was acknowledged when Dundee industrialist Sir David Baxter of Kilmaron (1793–1872) founded a Regius Chair of Engineering in 1868. He endowed the post with the sum of £6,000, which H. M. Treasury supplemented with an annual grant of £200. The first appointee was Henry Charles Fleeming Jenkin (1833–1885) who had been Professor of Engineering at University College, London since 1866.

His successor, in 1885, was George Frederick Armstrong (1842-1900), a specialist in railway engineering from Yorkshire. The Fulton Engineering Laboratory was established in 1889 as a place for both instruction and analysis of materials. Armstrong died in 1900 and was succeeded by Sir Thomas Hudson Beare (1859-1940). Under 'Huddy', the Engineering Department grow from a tiny one in Old College basement to over a hundred occupying what the Edinburgh University Journal called "one of the best planned and equipped engineering schools in the Empire". These were the new engineering facilities at the university's King's Buildings, which had been opened in 1935.

In 1946 Ronald Arnold, a Glasgow-born specialist in structural analysis and gyrodynamics, was appointed from Swansea University as the fourth Regius Professor of Engineering. Arnold pioneered in 1960 the division of the unitary department of engineering into separate departments of civil, mechanical and electrical engineering.

Following the untimely death of Arnold in 1963, Leslie Jaeger was appointed fifth Regius Professor, from Magdalene College, Cambridge. Jaeger’s appointment was brief, leaving after only four years to take up the Chair of Civil Engineering and Applied Mechanics at McGill University (coincidentally, the Chair that a previous Regius Professor, George Armstrong, had held much earlier).

James King, former Chief Scientist in the Naval Construction Research Establishment at Rosyth, became the sixth Regius Professor in 1968, and on his retirement in 1983 the seventh holder of the Chair was Joseph McGeough, who was appointed from the University of Aberdeen to expand the Edinburgh research activities in electro-chemical machining.

Following McGeough's retiral in 2005, the university appointed, in 2007, Peter Grant as the eighth Regius Professor of Engineering, from within the enlarged 26-strong body of professors in the newly merged School of Engineering. Grant had previously led the signal processing research at Edinburgh, with achievements in the design of adaptive filters and mobile communication receivers. He was President of EURASIP, the European Association for Signal Processing from 2000–02 and recipient of the 2004 IEE Faraday medal. In 2008 he was awarded an OBE.

In 2013 Jason Reese was appointed the ninth Regius Professor of Engineering. With a background in physics and applied mathematics, his research focuses on multiscale flow systems in which the molecular nature of the fluid determines the overall fluid dynamics.

Regius Professors of Engineering

Henry Charles Fleeming Jenkin (1833–1885)

George Frederick Armstrong (1842-1900), 1885-

Sir Thomas Hudson Beare (1859-1940), 1901-

Ronald Nathan Arnold (1908-1963), 1946-1963

Leslie Gordon Jaeger (1926-1913), 1965-1968

James Lawrence King (1922-c1995), 1968-1983

Joseph Anthony McGeough (1940-), 1983-2013

Jason Reese, 2013-