Background
John Robison was born on February 4, 1739, in Boghall, Baldernock, Stirlingshire, Scotland. The son of a Glasgow merchant, Robison was born at his father's estate at Boghall.
1798
First Page of John Robison's Proofs of a Conspiracy Against all the Religions and Governments of Europe.
Engraved portrait of John Robison (1739-1805) a Scottish physicist, mathematician, and professor of philosophy at the University of Edinburgh.. Dated 19th century.
John Robison. Stipple engraving by K. Mackenzie after J. Tassie.
University of Glasgow, Glasgow, Scotland, United Kingdom
John Robison studied at the University of Glasgow where he received his Master of Arts degree in 1756.
High School of Glasgow, Old Anniesland 637 Crow Road Glasgow, G13 1PL United Kingdom
Robison attended Glasgow Grammar School.
Royal Society of Edinburgh, New Town, Edinburgh, Scotland
Robison was a member and one of the founders of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
https://www.amazon.com/Proofs-Conspiracy-Governments-Freemasons-Illuminati/dp/1502306387/ref=sr_1_3?qid=1576584135&refinements=p_27%3AJohn+Robison&s=books&sr=1-3&text=John+Robison
1797
https://www.amazon.com/Elements-Mechanical-Philosophy-Substance-Lectures/dp/1362045896/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=Elements+of+Mechanical+Philosophy%3A+Being+the+Substance+of+a+Course+of+Lectures+on+that+Science&qid=1576584226&s=books&sr=1-1
1804
mathematician philosopher physicist scientist
John Robison was born on February 4, 1739, in Boghall, Baldernock, Stirlingshire, Scotland. The son of a Glasgow merchant, Robison was born at his father's estate at Boghall.
Robison attended a Glasgow elementary school and, at the age of eleven, entered the University of Glasgow, where he received the Master of Arts in 1756.
Although he was encouraged by his father to pursue a clerical career, his strongest interests were in mathematics and mechanics. Accordingly, in 1759 he accepted an offer to tutor a son of Admiral Charles Knowles in mathematics and navigation, thus becoming involved in the naval affairs that occupied him intermittently over the next fourteen years. Robison went with the younger Knowles to Canada, where he served as a midshipman, performed surveys, and took part in James Wolfe’s assault on Quebec. Later he sailed to Portugal. During these periods of service at sea he gained considerable knowledge of seamanship and naval technology.
In 1761 Robison was appointed by the Board of Longitude to represent it in the testing of the timekeeper John Harrison had constructed for determining longitude at sea; he observed the device on a trip to Jamaica. By 1762, however, the prospects of a naval career had dimmed and, after briefly reconsidering the Church, he returned to Glasgow to resume his studies.
Before leaving Glasgow in 1758, Robison had become acquainted with Joseph Black and James Watt. Indeed, it was Robison, who had already published a note on an improvement of the Newcomen engine, who first turned Watt's attention to the steam engine. He revived these friendships and became Black’s student. During the next four years, Robison was closely associated with both men; and in 1766, when Black transferred to the University of Edinburgh, his recommendation led to Robison's appointment as lecturer in chemistry at the University of Glasgow. The appointment was renewed annually, and Robison seemed to be established in an academic career.
In 1770, however, he left Glasgow again, this time to accompany Admiral Knowles to St. Petersburg, where Knowles served as president of the Russian Board of Admiralty and Robison acted as his secretary. He worked on plans to improve the construction and navigation of Russian warships until 1772 when he accepted the post of inspector general of the corps of marine cadets at Kronstadt, an appointment that carried the rank of lieutenant colonel. When Robison was offered - again on Black's recommendation - the position of professor of natural philosophy at the University of Edinburgh in 1773, he abandoned a naval career for the second time and returned to Scotland. The following year he took up his duties at the university, where he remained until his death.
Although he published three articles in the early volumes of the Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Robison’s scientific career remained undistinguished until he became the principal contributor to the third edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. From 1793 to 1801 he composed a remarkably wide-ranging series of articles that, according to Thomas Young (who revised several of them for the fourth edition), “taken together, undeniably exhibit a more complete view of the modern improvements of physical science than had ever before been in the possession of the British public ...” Their strongest influence was in applied structural mechanics, where the articles “Strength of Materials,” “Roof,” “Arch,” “Carpentry,” and “Centre” (for bridges) essentially constituted a unique course of instruction deliberately presented in a didactic manner for the benefit of the artisans and craftsmen who filled the ranks of British engineering.
In preparing these articles Robison consulted the engineer John Rennie (the elder), who had attended his courses at the University of Edinburgh and whose practical knowledge of building he valued greatly. His approach to these technical topics was, however, essentially theoretical. In his discussion of the theory of flexure, Robison emphasized the soundness of the neglected analyses that Parent and Coulomb had formulated and that now appeared for the first time in English. And in his presentation of column theory he called attention to Euler’s error in assuming that when a column bends, the cross-sections sustain only tension. An indication of the influence of these articles is that through them the terms “strength of materials” and "neutral point” (to designate the position on the cross section of a beam where the stresses are zero) became established. After his death, many of Robison’s Britannica articles were edited by David Brewster, who had been one of his pupils, and were published as A System of Mechanical Philosophy (1822).
Public recognition of the need for applied mechanics came only late in Robison’s life. In 1800, when Thomas Telford proposed a cast-iron bridge over the Thames in the form of a single arch, there were no theoretically informed engineers who could analyze and evaluate the design; instead Parliament sought advice from a committee divided into “theoreticians” and “practitioners,” Robison being included among the former. Despite a few helpful suggestions by Robison and several of the “practitioners,” the general inability of the committee to analyze Telford’s design directed attention to the importance of furthering the application of mathematics and mechanics to the problems of structural engineering. Half a century later, applied mechanics had become a distinct field of study and professorships of engineering had been established. In 1855 W. J. Rankine, in his inaugural address at the University of Glasgow, paid tribute to Robison for his role in uniting theoretical science and the practical arts.
Robison made only the slightest original contributions to scientific research, the most notable being his determination, on strictly experimental grounds, that electrical attraction and repulsion follow an inverse- square law. Using an electrometer of his own design, he found the repulsion to be inversely proportional to the 2.06th power of the distance and the attraction slightly less than the second power. Although he read a paper on his results in 1769 (two years after Priestley had arrived at the inverse-square law through an elegant analogy between electricity and gravitation), he failed to publish them until 1801.
Robison’s most widely read work, however, was a fiercely anti-Jacobin tract in which he attributed the French Revolution largely to Continental Freemasonry (into which he had been initiated during his journey to Russia), materialism, and the influence of the “German Union” and the short-lived “Order of Illuminati.” The book, an intemperate expression of the Tory politics that dominated Edinburgh during the 1790s, was later soundly criticized as credulous and tendentious by John Playfair, a steadfast and outspoken Whig, who succeeded Robison in the chair of natural philosophy at Edinburgh. Published in 1797, it went through several editions in two years and, despite the implausibility of the argument, was well received in anti-Jacobin and some sectarian circles.
(Volume 2)
1822Robison was deeply religious.
Robison was politically conservative.
Joseph Robison became favorably impressed with Boskovic’s theory of point atoms both because he considered it to be an elaboration of Newtonian principles (the action between the points is accounted for by attractive and repulsive forces) and because he saw it as a rejoinder to the materialism that he believed was corrupting natural philosophy. He contributed a long article on Boskovic's system to the Britannica and lectured on point atomism to his students at Edinburgh.
Towards the end of his life, he became an enthusiastic conspiracy theorist, publishing Proofs of a Conspiracy in 1797, alleging clandestine intrigue by the Illuminati and Freemasons (the work's full title was Proofs of a Conspiracy against all the Religions and Governments of Europe, carried on in the secret meetings of Freemasons, Illuminati, and Reading Societies). The secret agent monk, Alexander Horn provided much of the material for Robison's allegations.
Robison was a member and one of the founders of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.