Fleeming Jenkin
Henry Charles Fleeming Jenkin (* March 25, 1833 in Dungeness, † June 12, 1885 in Edinburgh ) was a British electrical engineer.
His parents were Captain Charles Jenkin and Henrietta Camilla, née Jackson. His mother moved with him to Barjarg in southern Scotland. He attended school in Jedburgh, Scottish Borders, and then the Edinburgh Academy. Among his classmates were James Clerk Maxwell and Peter Guthrie Tait. After the retirement of his father in 1847 the family moved to Frankfurt am Main and the following year in Paris, where he experienced the February Revolution. The Jenkins then moved to Genoa, where they experienced another revolution. Here he attended the University, studied with Professor Padre Bancalari electromagnetism and earned his master. In 1850 he worked in a locomotive workshop under Philip Taylor from Marseille. After 1851 his aunt Anna had died, the family moved back to Manchester, where he worked in William Fairbairn Fairbairn Works company. In whose behalf he checked 1851-55 the technical equipment of the Swiss Federal Railways. After leaving Fairbairn, he produced an expert report for the proposed Lukmanier Railway in Switzerland. In 1856 he started as a draftsman at Penn's engineering works in Greenwich. Shortly thereafter, he became a railroad engineer to Liddell & Gordon, where he was engaged in the development, production and laying of underwater telegraph cables. In 1857 he was an engineer at RS Newall & Co. in Gateshead, which laid the first transatlantic telegraph cable with Glass, Elliott & Co. of Greenwich.
In the spring of 1855 he equipped the S. S. Elba from Birkenhead. Beginning of 1859 he met Sir William Thomson, later his friend and partner. From 1861 onwards, he studied with him on the applicability of gutta-percha as a cable wire - insulating and the electrical resistance of deep-sea telegraph cable. He described methods for measuring precise Widerstandsmessungenund campaigned for the global launch of the unit ohms. Cromwell Fleetwood Varley was another partner in marketing their telegraphic instruments.
In 1861 he left Newall & Co. and entered into a partnership with HC Forde. Forde worked for the British government on the Malta - Alexandria cable. However, the business was bad. In February 1859, he had married Annie Austin. After 1963 their first son was born, they moved to Claygate near Esher. In 1866 he became a professor at University College London. In 1867 he criticized Darwin's theory.
He invented a regulator, a flow control valve for water hydraulics, Maxwell called in 1868 on Governors. To 1869, he was friends with his student Robert Louis Stevenson. 1878 James Alfred Ewing worked for him to telegraph cable laying expeditions, including in Brazil. Jenkin 1882 invented an electric conveyor belt for cable production.
Works
- Electricity on and magnetism; 1880 translated by Franz Serafin Exner -