Word of his death was kept from Mrs. Jenkin; and she survived him
no more than nine and forty hours. On the day before her death,
she received a letter from her old friend Miss Bell of Manchester,
knew the hand, kissed the envelope, and laid it on her heart; so
that she too died upon a pleasure. Half an hour after midnight, on
the eighth of February, she fell asleep: it is supposed in her
seventy-eighth year.
Thus, in the space of less than ten months, the four seniors of
this family were taken away; but taken with such features of
opportunity in time or pleasant courage in the sufferer, that grief
was tempered with a kind of admiration. The effect on Fleeming was
profound. His pious optimism increased and became touched with
something mystic and filial. 'The grave is not good, the
approaches to it are terrible,' he had written in the beginning of
his mother's illness: he thought so no more, when he had laid
father and mother side by side at Stowting. He had always loved
life; in the brief time that now remained to him, he seemed to be
half in love with death. 'Grief is no duty,' he wrote to Miss
Bell; 'it was all too beautiful for grief,' he said to me; but the
emotion, call it by what name we please, shook him to his depths;
his wife thought he would have broken his heart when he must
demolish the Captain's trophy in the dining-room, and he seemed
thenceforth scarcely the same man.
These last years were indeed years of an excessive demand upon his
vitality; he was not only worn out with sorrow, he was worn out by
hope. The singular invention to which he gave the name of
telpherage, had of late consumed his time, overtaxed his strength
and overheated his imagination. The words in which he first
mentioned his discovery to me - 'I am simply Alnaschar' - were not
only descriptive of his state of mind, they were in a sense
prophetic; since whatever fortune may await his idea in the future,
it was not his to see it bring forth fruit. Alnaschar he was
indeed; beholding about him a world all changed, a world filled
with telpherage wires; and seeing not only himself and family but
all his friends enriched. It was his pleasure, when the company
was floated, to endow those whom he liked with stock; one, at
least, never knew that he was a possible rich man until the grave
had closed over his stealthy benefactor. And however Fleeming
chafed among material and business difficulties, this rainbow
vision never faded; and he, like his father and his mother, may be
said to have died upon a pleasure. But the strain told, and he
knew that it was telling. 'I am becoming a fossil,' he had written
five years before, as a kind of plea for a holiday visit to his
beloved Italy. 'Take care! If I am Mr. Fossil, you will be Mrs.
Fossil, and Jack will be Jack Fossil, and all the boys will be
little fossils, and then we shall be a collection.' There was no
fear more chimerical for Fleeming; years brought him no repose; he
was as packed with energy, as fiery in hope, as at the first;
weariness, to which he began to be no stranger, distressed, it did
not quiet him. He feared for himself, not without ground, the fate
which had overtaken his mother; others shared the fear. In the
changed life now made for his family, the elders dead, the sons
going from home upon their education, even their tried domestic
(Mrs. Alice Dunns) leaving the house after twenty-two years of
service, it was not unnatural that he should return to dreams of
Italy. He and his wife were to go (as he told me) on 'a real
honeymoon tour.' He had not been alone with his wife 'to speak
of,' he added, since the birth of his children. But now he was to
enjoy the society of her to whom he wrote, in these last days, that
she was his 'Heaven on earth.' Now he was to revisit Italy, and
see all the pictures and the buildings and the scenes that he
admired so warmly, and lay aside for a time the irritations of his
strenuous activity. Nor was this all. A trifling operation was to
restore his former lightness of foot; and it was a renovated youth
that was to set forth upon this re‰nacted honeymoon.
The operation was performed; it was of a trifling character, it
seemed to go well, no fear was entertained; and his wife was
reading aloud to him as he lay in bed, when she perceived him to
wander in his mind. It is doubtful if he ever recovered a sure
grasp upon the things of life; and he was still unconscious when he
passed away, June the twelfth, 1885, in the fifty-third year of his
age. He passed; but something in his gallant vitality had
impressed itself upon his friends, and still impresses. Not from
one or two only, but from many, I hear the same tale of how the
imagination refuses to accept our loss and instinctively looks for
his reappearing, and how memory retains his voice and image like
things of yesterday. Others, the well-beloved too, die and are
progressively forgotten; two years have passed since Fleeming was
laid to rest beside his father, his mother, and his Uncle John; and
the thought and the look of our friend still haunt us.
APPENDIX.
NOTE ON THE CONTRIBUTIONS OF FLEEMING JENKIN TO ELECTRICAL AND
ENGINEERING SCIENCE. BY SIR WILLIAM THOMSON, F.R.S., LL D., ETC.,
ETC.
IN the beginning of the year 1859 my former colleague (the first
British University Professor of Engineering), Lewis Gordon, at that
time deeply engaged in the then new work of cable making and cable
laying, came to Glasgow to see apparatus for testing submarine
cables and signalling through them, which I had been preparing for
practical use on the first Atlantic cable, and which had actually
done service upon it, during the six weeks of its successful
working between Valencia and Newfoundland. As soon as he had seen
something of what I had in hand, he said to me, 'I would like to
show this to a young man of remarkable ability, at present engaged
in our works at Birkenhead.' Fleeming Jenkin was accordingly
telegraphed for, and appeared next morning in Glasgow. He remained
for a week, spending the whole day in my class-room and laboratory,
and thus pleasantly began our lifelong acquaintance. I was much
struck, not only with his brightness and ability, but with his
resolution to understand everything spoken of, to see if possible
thoroughly through every difficult question, and (no if about
this!) to slur over nothing. I soon found that thoroughness of
honesty was as strongly engrained in the scientific as in the moral
side of his character.
In the first week of our acquaintance, the electric telegraph and,
particularly, submarine cables, and the methods, machines, and
instruments for laying, testing, and using them, formed naturally
the chief subject of our conversations and discussions; as it was
in fact the practical object of Jenkin's visit to me in Glasgow;
but not much of the week had passed before I found him remarkably
interested in science generally, and full of intelligent eagerness
on many particular questions of dynamics and physics. When he
returned from Glasgow to Birkenhead a correspondence commenced
between us, which was continued without intermission up to the last
days of his life. It commenced with a well-sustained fire of
letters on each side about the physical qualities of submarine
cables, and the practical results attainable in the way of rapid
signalling through them. Jenkin used excellently the valuable
opportunities for experiment allowed him by Newall, and his partner
Lewis Gordon, at their Birkenhead factory. Thus he began definite
scientific investigation of the copper resistance of the conductor,
and the insulating resistance and specific inductive capacity of
its gutta-percha coating, in the factory, in various stages of
manufacture; and he was the very first to introduce systematically
into practice the grand system of absolute measurement founded in
Germany by Gauss and Weber. The immense value of this step, if
only in respect to the electric telegraph, is amply appreciated by
all who remember or who have read something of the history of
submarine telegraphy; but it can scarcely be known generally how
much it is due to Jenkin.
Looking to the article 'Telegraph (Electric)' in the last volume of
the old edition of the 'Encyclopaedia Britannica,' which was
published about the year 1861, we find on record that Jenkin's
measurements in absolute units of the specific resistance of pure
gutta-percha, and of the gutta-percha with Chatterton's compound
constituting the insulation of the Red Sea cable of 1859, are given
as the only results in the way of absolute measurements of the
electric resistance of an insulating material which had then been
made. These remarks are prefaced in the 'Encyclopaedia' article by
the following statement: 'No telegraphic testing ought in future
to be accepted in any department of telegraphic business which has
not this definite character; although it is only within the last
year that convenient instruments for working, in absolute measure,
have been introduced at all, and the whole system of absolute
measure is still almost unknown to practical electricians.'
A particular result of great importance in respect to testing is
referred to as follows in the 'Encyclopaedia' article: 'The
importance of having results thus stated in absolute measure is
illustrated by the circumstance, that the writer has been able at
once to compare them, in the manner stated in a preceding
paragraph, with his own previous deductions from the testings of
the Atlantic cable during its manufacture in 1857, and with Weber's
measurements of the specific resistance of copper.' It has now
become universally adapted - first of all in England; twenty-two
years later by Germany, the country of its birth; and by France and
Italy, and all the other countries of Europe and America -
practically the whole scientific world - at the Electrical Congress
in Paris in the years 1882 and 1884.
An important paper of thirty quarto pages published in the
'Transactions of the Royal Society' for June 19, 1862, under the
title 'Experimental Researches on the Transmission of Electric
Signals through submarine cables, Part I. Laws of Transmission
through various lengths of one cable, by Fleeming Jenkin, Esq.,
communicated by C. Wheatstone, Esq., F.R.S.,' contains an account
of a large part of Jenkin's experimental work in the Birkenhead
factory during the years 1859 and 1860. This paper is called Part
I. Part II. alas never appeared, but something that it would have
included we can see from the following ominous statement which I
find near the end of Part I.: 'From this value, the
electrostatical capacity per unit of length and the specific
inductive capacity of the dielectric, could be determined. These
points will, however, be more fully treated of in the second part
of this paper.' Jenkin had in fact made a determination at
Birkenhead of the specific inductive capacity of gutta-percha, or
of the gutta-percha and Chatterton's compound constituting the
insulation of the cable, on which he experimented. This was the
very first true measurement of the specific inductive capacity of a
dielectric which had been made after the discovery by Faraday of
the existence of the property, and his primitive measurement of it
for the three substances, glass, shellac, and sulphur; and at the
time when Jenkin made his measurements the existence of specific
inductive capacity was either unknown, or ignored, or denied, by
almost all the scientific authorities of the day.
The original determination of the microfarad, brought out under the
auspices of the British Association Committee on Electrical
Standards, is due to experimental work by Jenkin, described in a
paper, 'Experiments on Capacity,' constituting No. IV. of the
appendix to the Report presented by the Committee to the Dundee
Meeting of 1867. No other determination, so far as I know, of this
important element of electric measurement has hitherto been made;
and it is no small thing to be proud of in respect to Jenkin's fame
as a scientific and practical electrician that the microfarad which
we now all use is his.
The British Association unit of electrical resistance, on which was
founded the first practical approximation to absolute measurement
on the system of Gauss and Weber, was largely due to Jenkin's zeal
as one of the originators, and persevering energy as a working
member, of the first Electrical Standards Committee. The
experimental work of first making practical standards, founded on
the absolute system, which led to the unit now known as the British
Association ohm, was chiefly performed by Clerk Maxwell and Jenkin.
The realisation of the great practical benefit which has resulted
from the experimental and scientific work of the Committee is
certainly in a large measure due to Jenkin's zeal and perseverance
as secretary, and as editor of the volume of Collected Reports of
the work of the Committee, which extended over eight years, from
1861 till 1869. The volume of Reports included Jenkin's Cantor
Lectures of January, 1866, 'On Submarine Telegraphy,' through which
the practical applications of the scientific principles for which
he had worked so devotedly for eight years became part of general
knowledge in the engineering profession.
Jenkin's scientific activity continued without abatement to the
end. For the last two years of his life he was much occupied with
a new mode of electric locomotion, a very remarkable invention of
his own, to which he gave the name of 'Telpherage.' He persevered
with endless ingenuity in carrying out the numerous and difficult
mechanical arrangements essential to the project, up to the very
last days of his work in life. He had completed almost every
detail of the realisation of the system which was recently opened
for practical working at Glynde, in Sussex, four months after his
death.
His book on 'Magnetism and Electricity,' published as one of
Longman's elementary series in 1873, marked a new departure in the
exposition of electricity, as the first text-book containing a
systematic application of the quantitative methods inaugurated by
the British Association Committee on Electrical Standards. In 1883
the seventh edition was published, after there had already appeared
two foreign editions, one in Italian and the other in German.
His papers on purely engineering subjects, though not numerous, are
interesting and valuable. Amongst these may be mentioned the
article 'Bridges,' written by him for the ninth edition of the
'Encyclopaedia Britannica,' and afterwards republished as a
separate treatise in 1876; and a paper 'On the Practical
Application of Reciprocal Figures to the Calculation of Strains in
Framework,' read before the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and
published in the 'Transactions' of that Society in 1869. But
perhaps the most important of all is his paper 'On the Application
of Graphic Methods to the Determination of the Efficiency of
Machinery,' read before the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and
published in the 'Transactions,' vol. xxviii. (1876-78), for which
he was awarded the Keith Gold Medal. This paper was a continuation
of the subject treated in 'Reulaux's Mechanism,' and, recognising
the value of that work, supplied the elements required to
constitute from Reulaux's kinematic system a full machine receiving
energy and doing work.
II.
NOTE ON THE WORK OF FLEEMING JENKIN IN CONNECTION WITH SANITARY
REFORM. BY LT. COL. ALEXANDER FERGUSSON.
because the UK volunteer could not locate a date of death for Lt.
Col. Alexander Fergusson - this is necessary for UK copyright
reasons. If anyone could help with this information please contact
ccx074@coventry.ac.uk]
