Education
Largely self-taught, he studied botany, learned several foreign languages, constructed a ‘velocipede’ or early bicycle, and experimented with the production of coal gas.
Largely self-taught, he studied botany, learned several foreign languages, constructed a ‘velocipede’ or early bicycle, and experimented with the production of coal gas.
He built three orrerys in a workshop attached to at his home, now demolished, in the Kirton Brae area of Fenwick and was eventually appointed instrument maker to King William IV, moving to London, but retiring to Fenwick. He is buried in the Fenwick Kirk graveyard. He had left school at the age of only thirteen.
However astronomy held a particular fascination for him and led to his constructing, in his spare time, three working models of the solar system, known as orrerys.
Orrerys
The Society of Arts, who awarded him a silver medal, calculated that his third orrery was the most perfect built up to that time. He built three orrerys between 1823 and 1833, the last of which is now on display in Glasgow"s Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum.
This was the most intricate and it took him four years to finish it, measuring 1000mm x 3000mm x 3000mm. Entirely his own work it has 175 wheels and more than 200 moving parts.
lieutenant is acknowledged to be one of the best in the world.
Fulton took the orrery on a tour of the United Kingdom. Such was the public interest that in 1869 a group of Glasgow businessmen led by William Walker bought the orrery for the city. lieutenant was brought up from London and then toured around Glasgow schools and museums until the 1930s when it found a more permanent home in the Old Glasgow Museum.
This is the public meeting hall for Fenwick, maintained by East Ayrshire Council.
lieutenant was previously the Guthrie Memorial Free Church of 1844, and following a worldwide fund raising campaign sufficient funds had been raised by 1919 and the hall was opened in 1920.