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 (Baxter's own choice) was Henry Charles Fleeming Jenkin (1833–1885) who had been Professor of Engineering at University College, London since 1866.

Owing to a lack of funds, it was initially impossible to establish a laboratory for the practical teaching of engineering. Teaching was thus restricted to drawing office instruction under Jenkins and for the first few years of the tenure of his successor, George Frederick Armstrong (1842-1900), a specialist in railway engineering. Finally, in 1889, the University Court allotted a bequest of £3,000 from John Fulton to build a laboratory. Opened in 1891-92, tthe Fulton Engineering Laboratory was used for both instruction and analysis of materials. Two years later, in 1893, the Department of Engineering was transferred from the Faculty of Arts to the newly created Faculty of Science.

The department continued, however, to be housed in the basement of Old College, where space became an increasingly pressing issue. Urged by the third holder of the Chair, Sir Thomas Hudson Beare (1859-1940), the University Court allotted funds provided by the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland to create new premises for the department. In 1905, it moved, along with the Department of Natural Philosophy to High School Yards.

Under Hudson Beare (known as 'Huddy'), the Engineering Department experienced a rapid increase in students. New lectureships were created in Hydraulics, Strength of Materials, Engineering Design, and Drawing, which, in turn, created a fresh demand for more teaching and laboratory space. The end of the First World War brought a massive influx of new students (100 candidates for the B.Sc. in Engineering in 1922, as opposed to 7 in 1906). Their needs could not be fully met by the High School Yards buildings, and in 1927 the University Court decided to allocate a bequest from James Sanderson of Galashiels to create a purpose-built establishment at the new science campus of King's Buildings. The Sanderson Building, designed by Sir Robert Lorimer (1864-1929) and John Fraser Matthew (1875-1955) was opened on 28 January 1932. The new premises housed what the Edinburgh University Journal called "one of the best planned and equipped engineering schools in the Empire".

Hudson Beare died in 1940, after four decades in post. The Chair remained vacant until 1946, when Ronald Arnold, a Glasgow-born specialist in structural analysis and gyrodynamics, was appointed from Swansea University. In 1960, Arnold oversaw 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 (a Chair which, coincidentally, had previously been held by an earlier Regius Professor, George Armstrong).

[James Lawrence King (1922-c1995)|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

• 1868-1885: Henry Charles Fleeming Jenkin (1833–1885)
• 1885-1900: George Frederick Armstrong (1842-1900)
• 1901-1940: Sir Thomas Hudson Beare (1859-1940)
• 1946-1963: Ronald Nathan Arnold (1908-1963)
• 1965-1968: Leslie Gordon Jaeger (1926-2013)
• 1968-1983: James Lawrence King (1922-c1995)
• 1983-2005: Joseph Anthony McGeough (1940-)
• 2007-2009: Peter Mitchell Grant (1944- )
• 2013- : Jason Reese