Lewis Gordon (civil engineer)

File:The grave of Lewis Dunbar Brodie Gordon in Greyfriars Kirkyard, Edinburgh.jpg

The grave of Lewis Dunbar Brodie Gordon in Greyfriars Kirkyard, Edinburgh

Lewis Dunbar Brodie Gordon (1815–1876) was a Scottish civil engineer.

Life

He was the fourth son of Joseph Gordon, an Edinburgh lawyer, and his wife Anne Clunes.

A student and assistant to Isambard Kingdom Brunel, during the construction of the Thames Tunnel, he made a career change to mining. Registering as a student at the Freiburg School of Mines, Germany, he then studied further at the École Polytechnique in Paris.

In 1838 he visited the mines at Clausthal, and met Wilhelm Albert. Impressed by what he saw, he wrote to his friend Robert Stirling Newall, urging him to "Invent a machine for making (wire ropes)". On receipt of Gordon's letter, Newall designed a wire rope machine. On Gordon's return to the UK in 1839, he formed a partnership with Newall and Charles Liddell, registering R.S. Newall and Company in Dundee. On 17 August 1840, Newall took out a patent for "certain improvements in wire rope and the machinery for making such rope," and R.S. Newall and Company commenced making wire ropes for "Mining, Railway, Ships' Rigging, and other purposes".

Gordon became a mentor to the brothers James Thomson and William Thomson, encouraging their interest in the development of a general theory of heat. In 1848 he gave the brothers a copy of French physicist Sadi Carnot’s 1824 treatise On the Motive Power of Fire, with which he used to write his first thermodynamics article the 1848 “On an Absolute Thermometric Scale Founded on Carnot’s Theory of the Motive Power of Heat”, which founded the absolute temperature scale. He was conferred with Honorary Membership of the Institution of Engineers and Shipbuilders in Scotland in 1859.[1]

He died on 28 April 1876 at Totteridge in Hertfordshire and is buried in the family plot in Greyfriars Kirkyard in central Edinburgh. The grave lies on the western wall of the western extension.

Family

His sister married William Siemens, Carl Wilhelm Siemens, of Siemens & Halske. Gordon's own wife was from Hanover and linked by marriage to the Siemens family.