Fleeming Jenkin was an English polymath, remarkable for his versatility. He is primarily known as an electrician and cable engineer who invented units of electrical measurement; his most famous invention is the cable car or telpherage. Apart from this, he was a noted economist, lecturer, linguist, critic, actor, dramatist and artist. He also served as Regius Professor of Engineering at the University of Edinburgh.
Background
Fleeming Jenkin was born Henry Charles Fleeming Jenkin on March 25, 1833, to an old and eccentric family in a government building near Dungeness, Kent, England. He was the only child of Charles Jenkin, a naval officer, and the former Henrietta Camilla Jackson, a political liberal and popular novelist. Jenkin received his name after Admiral Fleeming, one of his father's patrons. On his father's retirement in 1847, the family moved to Frankfurt, partly from motives of economy. Here Jenkin and his father spent a pleasant time together, sketching old castles, and observing the customs of the peasantry. At thirteen, Jenkin had produced a romance of three hundred lines in heroic couplets, a novel, and innumerable poems, none of which are now extant.
Education
Jenkin's mother was responsible for his education. She took him to Barjarg where she taught him drawing and allowed him to ride his pony on the moors. He then went to school at Jedburgh, Borders, and afterwards to the Edinburgh Academy, where he was among the best students and won many prizes. Among his schoolfellows were James Clerk Maxwell and Peter Guthrie Tait. His family later lived in Frankfurt, Paris, and Genoa during the period 1846-1851.
At Genoa, Jenkin attended the university, being its first Protestant student. Father Bancalari, the professor of natural philosophy, lectured on electromagnetism, his physical laboratory being the best in Italy. Jenkin took the degree of Master of Arts with first-class honors, his special subject having been electromagnetism. The questions in the examinations were in Latin and had to be answered in Italian.
Jenkin also attended an art school in the city and gained a silver medal for a drawing from one of Raphael's cartoons. His holidays were spent in sketching, and his evenings in learning to play the piano or, when permissible, at the theater or opera house. He had conceived a taste for acting.
After ten years of employment in various British engineering firms, mainly in the design and manufacture of the earliest long submarine cables (such as that under the Red Sea) and the associated cable-laying equipment, Jenkin in 1861 formed a consulting engineering partnership in London. In the same year, his close friend William Thomson initiated the Committee on Electrical Standards of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, of which Jenkin was appointed reporter. Jenkin's lasting reputation in electrical science rests largely on his contributions to the work of this committee, through policy direction, participation in experiments, and the writing or editing of six reports between 1862 and 1869. Of major importance was the establishment of the ohm as an absolute unit of resistance, including the preparation of materials for construction of reliable resistance units, and the development of precision methods (0.1 percent) for resistance measurement. In 1867 he made the first absolute measurement of capacitance. Collaborators in the committee’s activities included Thomson, James Clerk Maxwell, Carey Foster, Latimer Clark, and Charles Wheatstone.
Taking part in numerous cable-laying expeditions after 1861, Jenkin often shared the consultant duties with Thomson. Of his thirty-five British patents, many on cable-laying inventions were held jointly with Thomson. The patents and consulting work eventually made him financially independent.
In 1866, Jenkin was appointed as a professor of engineering at University College, London. Two years later his prospects suddenly improved. The partnership began to pay, and he was selected to fill the newly established Regius Chair of Engineering at Edinburgh University. His position at Edinburgh led to a partnership in cable work with Varley and Thomson, whom he always admired. Jenkin's practical and businesslike abilities were of assistance to Thomson, relieving him of routine and sparing his time for other work. In 1870 the siphon recorder for tracing a cablegram in ink instead of merely flashing it by the moving ray of the mirror galvanometer was introduced on long cables and became a source of profit to Jenkin and Varley as well as to Thomson, its inventor. Also In 1870, Jenkin published the essay "On the Graphical Representation of the Laws of Supply and Demand and their Application to Labour," in which he "introduced the diagrammatic method into the English economic literature" - an early published instance of supply and demand curves. His treatment extended beyond earlier treatments on the Continent, complete with comparative statics, welfare analysis, application to the labour market, and market-period and long-run distinctions. It was later popularized by Alfred Marshall and remains arguably the most famous graphic in economics.
In 1873 Thomson and Jenkin were engineers for the Western and Brazilian cable. It was manufactured by Hooper & Co. of Millwall and the wire was coated with Indian rubber, then a new insulator. The Hooper left Plymouth in June, and after touching at Madeira, where Thomson was up "sounding with his pianoforte wire at half-past three in the morning," they reached Pernambuco by the beginning of August and laid a cable to Pará.
After 1876 Jenkin waged a vigorous campaign against unsanitary plumbing practices in Edinburgh and elsewhere, and he actively promoted the automated electric transport of industrial raw materials by monorail and cable car (telpherage).
In 1878 Jenkin made a contribution to public health with his pamphlet Healthy Houses. The suggestion was made by William Fairbairn that house inspection by an association of competent individuals would protect homeowners from incompetent tradesmen and outline clearly work necessary for sanitary protection.
Fleeming Jenkin played a leading part in providing electricians with practical standards of measurement. Among his greatest accomplishments were planning the laying of the first Trans-Atlantic telegraphic cable and invention of telpherage. His Cantor lectures on submarine cables and his treatise on Electricity and Magnetism were notable at the time, including the latest developments in the subject. He provided the first diagrammatic representation of partial market equilibrium using supply and demand curves in the English-speaking world. He also recognized that the lack of competition would lead to indeterminacy.
It was Jenkin's work that precipitated Jevons to write and publish his revolutionary 1871 volume.
In mechanical engineering, his graphical methods of calculating strains in bridges, and determining the efficiency of mechanism, were valuable and won him the Keith Gold Medal from the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1877. He was also named Companion of the Order of the Bath.
Jenkin received an honorary Doctor of Law degree from the University of Glasgow in 1883.
At one period of his life, Jenkin was a freethinker, holding all dogmas as "mere blind struggles to express the inexpressible." Nevertheless, as time went on he returned to Christianity. "The longer I live," he wrote, "the more convinced I become of a direct care by God - which is reasonably impossible - but there it is." In his last year he took Communion.
Politics
As a boy, Jenkin witnessed the outbreak of the Revolution of 1848 and heard the first shot, describing the action in a letter written to an old schoolfellow. Later, when he was in Genoa, he experienced another revolution. That might have been the reason why he later took an active part in the political circle. Jenkin's mother, who was a political liberal, might have influenced him as well.
Views
Jenkin criticized Darwin's evolutionary theory by suggesting that Darwin's interpretation of natural selection couldn't possibly work, as described, if the reigning hypothesis of inheritance, blending inheritance, was also valid. Though Gregor Mendel's theory of particulate inheritance had been already published two years earlier, neither Jenkin nor Darwin would ever read it, and it would still be several decades before the blending inheritance model would be overturned in the scientific community. In this interim, Jenkin provided a mathematical argument, the swamping argument, that showed that under the blending inheritance model any advantageous mutations which might arise in a species would be quickly diluted out of any species after just a few generations. By contrast, Darwin's interpretation of natural selection required hundreds, if not thousands of generations of passing down such mutations in order to work. Jenkin thus concluded that natural selection could not possibly work if blending inheritance were also true. Despite Jenkin's argument containing a mistake, as A.S. Davis pointed out in 1871, it did not affect Jenkin's conclusion, nor mitigate the damage of Jenkin's criticisms of Darwin's ideas during the few decades when blending inheritance was still widely accepted.
Jenkin also referred to Lord Kelvin's recent (incorrect) estimation of the age of the earth. Kelvin had calculated that Fourier's theory of heat and the actions of tides on the earth's rotation allowed for earth no more than 100 million years old and doubted in so far the case for evolution based on the chronology. Criticism by Jenkin and A.W. Bennett, in fact, led Darwin to investigate and discuss the mechanism of inheritance more thoroughly. Darwin avoided a direct confrontation (as well in the case of chronology), but confessed that some of Jenkin's arguments were troubling - so troubling, in fact, that Darwin largely abandoned blending inheritance as the potential mechanism for his own inheritance model, pangenesis, in favor of a competing model of inheritance that derived from Lamarckism.
His artistic side showed itself in a paper on Artist and Critic, in which he defined the difference between the mechanical and fine arts. "In mechanical arts," he said, "the craftsman uses his skill to produce something useful, but (except in the rare case when he is at liberty to choose what he shall produce) his sole merit lies in skill. In the fine arts, the student uses skill to produce something beautiful."
A lady once said to him she would never be happy again. "What does that signify?" cried Jenkin; "We are not here to be happy, but to be good." On a friend remarking that Salvini's acting in Othello made him want to pray, Jenkin answered, "That is prayer."
Quotations:
"The popular conception of any philosophical doctrine is necessarily imperfect, and very generally unjust."
"People admire what is pretty in an ugly thing, not the ugly thing."
"All my life I have talked a good deal, with the almost unfailing result of making people sick of the sound of my tongue. It appeared to me that I had various things to say, and I had no malevolent feelings; but, nevertheless, the result was that expressed above. Well, lately some change has happened. If I talk to a person one day they must have me the next. Faces light up when they see me. 'Ah!' I say, 'Come here. Come and dine with me.' It's the most preposterous thing I ever experienced. It is curiously pleasant."
Membership
The Royal Society of London elected Jenkin a fellow in 1865; the Royal Society of Edinburgh followed suit in 1869, and he was its vice-president in 1879. He was also a member of the Institution of Civil Engineers.
Fellow
Royal Society
,
United Kingdom
1865 - 1885
Fellow
Royal Society of Edinburgh
,
United Kingdom
1869 - 1885
Personality
Jenkin was a clear, fluent speaker, and a successful teacher. His class was always in good order, for he instantly spotted and disciplined anyone who misbehaved.
Though admired and liked by his intimates, Jenkin was never popular with associates. His manner was hard, rasping, and unsympathetic. "Whatever virtues he possessed," said Mr. Stevenson, "he could never count on being civil." He showed so much courtesy to his wife, however, that a Styrian peasant who observed it spread a report in the village that Mrs. Jenkin, a great lady, had married beneath her. At the Savile Club, in London, he was known as the "man who dines here and goes up to Scotland." Jenkin was conscious of this churlishness, and latterly improved.
Jenkin was a good father, joining in his children's play as well as directing their studies. The boys used to wait outside his office for him at the close of business hours; and a story is told of little Frewen, the second son, entering in to him one day, while he was at work, and holding out a toy crane he was making, with the request, "Papa you might finiss windin' this for me, I'm so very busy to-day." He was fond of animals too, and his dog Plate regularly accompanied him to the University. But, as he used to say, "It's a cold home where a dog is the only representative of a child."
In the Highlands, Jenkin learned to love the Highland character and ways of life. He shot, rode and swam well, and taught his boys athletic exercises, boating, salmon fishing, and so on. He learned to dance a Highland reel, and began the study of Gaelic; but it proved too difficult for Jenkin. Once he took his family to Alt Aussee, in the Steiermark, where he hunted chamois, won a prize for shooting at the Schützenfest, learned the local dialect, sketched the neighborhood, and danced the steirischen Ländler with the peasants.
Jenkin showed great devotion to his relatives in their illnesses, and was worn out with grief and watching. His telpherage, too, had given him considerable anxiety; and his mother's illness, which affected her mind, had caused him fear.
In his spare time Jenkin wrote papers on a wide variety of subjects. He was a clear and graphic writer, and he also read selectively, preferring the story of David, the Odyssey, the Arcadia, the saga of Burnt Njal, and the Grand Cyrus. Aeschylus, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Ariosto, Boccaccio, Sir Walter Scott, Dumas, Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, and George Eliot were some of his favourite authors.
He was a rapid, fluent talker. Some of his sayings were shrewd and sharp; but he was sometimes aggressive.
He could draw a portrait with astonishing rapidity, and had been known to stop a passer-by for a few minutes and sketch her on the spot.
Jenkin also did gardening, without a natural liking for it, and soon became an ardent expert. He wrote reviews and lectured or amused himself in playing charades and reading poetry.
Physical Characteristics:
Jenkin is described as being of medium height, and very plain, with an unimposing manner.
Quotes from others about the person
Henrietta Camilla Jenkin: "He is as true as steel, and for no one will he bend right or left... Do not fancy him a Bobadil; he is only a very true, candid boy. I am so glad he remains in all respects but information a great child."
Robert Louis Stevenson: "It was Jenkin's principle to enjoy each day's happiness as it arises, like birds and children."
Sophocles, William Shakespeare, Ludovico Ariosto, Giovanni Boccaccio, Sir Walter Scott, Alexandre Dumas, Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, George Eliot
Sport & Clubs
horse riding, swimming, boating
Connections
In 1855 Jenkin became acquainted with Alfred Austin and his wife, who were both intellectually and socially attractive, and married their daughter Anne on February 21, 1859, at Northiam. The couple had two sons.
