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Naval engineer

John Scott Russell FRSE FRS FRSA (9 May 1808, Parkhead, Glasgow – 8 June 1882, Ventnor, Isle of Wight) was a Scottish civil engineer, naval architect and shipbuilder who built Great Eastern in collaboration with Isambard Kingdom Brunel. He made the discovery of the wave of translation that gave birth to the modern study of solitons, and developed the wave line system of ship construction. Russell was a promoter of the Great Exhibition of 1851.

John Russell was born on 9 May 1808 in Parkhead, Glasgow, the son of Reverend David Russell and Agnes Clark Scott. He spent one year at the University of St. Andrews before transferring to the University of Glasgow. It was while at the University of Glasgow that he added his mother's maiden name, Scott, to his own, to become John Scott Russell. He graduated from Glasgow University in 1825 at the age of 17 and moved to Edinburgh where he taught mathematics and science at the Leith Mechanics' Institute, achieving the highest attendance in the city. On the death of Sir John Leslie, Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh in 1832, Scott Russell, though only 24 years old, was elected to temporarily fill the vacancy pending the election of a permanent professor, due to his proficiency in the natural sciences and popularity as a lecturer. But although encouraged to stand for the permanent position he refused to compete with another candidate he admired and thereafter concentrated the engineering profession and experimental research on a large scale.

He married Harriette Osborne, daughter of the Irish baronet Sir Daniel Toler Osborne and Harriette Trench, daughter of the Earl of Clancarty in Dublin in 1839; they had two sons (Norman survived) and three daughters, Louise (1841–1878), Rachel (1845–1882) and Alice. In London they lived for five years in a house provided for the secretary of the Society of Arts and then moved to Sydenham Hill, which became a centre of attention especially after Russell and his friends moved Paxton's glasshouse for the Great Exhibition to the Crystal Palace close by. Arthur Sullivan and his friend Frederic Clay were frequent visitors at the Scott Russell home in the mid 1860s; Clay became engaged to Alice, and Sullivan wooed Rachel. While Clay was from a wealthy family, Sullivan was still a poor young composer from a poor family; the Scott Russells welcomed the engagement of Alice to Clay, who, however broke it off, but forbade the relationship between Sullivan and Rachel, although the two continued to see each other covertly. At some point in 1868, Sullivan started a simultaneous (and secret) affair with Louise (1841–1878). Both relationships had ceased by early 1869. The American engineer Alexander Lyman Holley befriended Scott Russell and his family on his various visits to London at the time of the construction of Great Eastern. Holley also visited Scott Russell's house in Sydenham. As a result of this, Holley, and his colleague Zerah Colburn, travelled on the maiden voyage of Great Eastern from Southampton to New York in June 1860. Scott Russell's son, Norman, stayed with Holley at his house in Brooklyn — Norman also travelled on the maiden voyage, one voyage that John Scott Russell did not make. His son, Norman, followed his father in becoming a naval architect, contributing to the Institution of Naval Architects which his father had founded.

While in Edinburgh he experimented with steam engines, using a square boiler for which he developed a method of staying the surface of the boiler which became universal. The Scottish Steam Carriage Company was formed producing a steam carriage with two cylinders developing 12 horsepower each. Six were constructed in 1834, well sprung and fitted out to high standard, which from March 1834 ran between Glasgow's George Square and the Tontine Hotel in Paisley at hourly intervals at 15 mph. The road trustees objected that it wore out the road and placed various obstructions of logs and stones in the road, which actually caused more discomfort for horse drawn carriages. But in July 1834 one of the carriages was overturned and the boiler smashed, causing the death of several passengers. Two of the coaches were sent to London where they ran for a short time between London and Greenwich.

Once Russell had a way of observing boats at hitherto unprecedented speeds at the front of his wave of translation, he tackled the more fundamental issue for boat design of finding the hull shape which gives the least resistance. This, he reasoned was concerned with moving the mass of water efficiently out of the way of the hull and then back to fill the gap after it has passed. By careful measurements with dynamometers he validated his theory that a versed sine wave produces the ideal shape. Initially he thought that the stern could be a mirror of the stem, but soon realised that the removing water produced something closer to conventional waves than his solitary waves and ended up with a rounded stern with a catenary shape. His studies produced a revolution in the design of hulls for merchant and navy vessels. Most ships of the time had rounded bows to optimise the cargo carrying capacity, but starting from the 1840s the "extreme clipper ships" started to show concave bows as increasingly did steam ships culminating with Great Eastern. After his views were propounded by Commander Fishbourne, the American naval architect John W. Griffiths acknowledged the force of Russell's work in his Treatise on marine and naval architecture of 1850 though he was grudging in acknowledging a debt to Russell.

Although his design for the Great Exhibition was trumped by that of Joseph Paxton, Scott Russell did design the Rotunde for the 1873 Vienna Exposition. At in diameter it was for nearly a century the largest cupola in the world, having no ties to obstruct the view. Some consider it his greatest structural engineering achievement.

His 1844 paper has become a classical paper and is quite frequently cited in soliton related papers or books even after more than one hundred and fifty years.