1. Thomas Stevenson PRSE MInstCE FRSSA FSAScot was a pioneering Scottish civil engineer, lighthouse designer and meteorologist, who designed over thirty lighthouses in and around Scotland, as well as the Stevenson screen used in meteorology.
22 Facts About Thomas Stevenson
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Thomas Stevenson's designs, celebrated as ground breaking, ushered in a new era of lighthouse creation.
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Thomas Stevenson served as president of the Royal Scottish Society of Arts, as president of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and was a co-founder of the Scottish Meteorological Society.
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Thomas Stevenson was the father of writer Robert Louis Stevenson.
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Thomas Stevenson was born at 2 Baxters Place in Edinburgh, on 22 July 1818, the youngest son of engineer Robert Stevenson, and his wife Jean Smith.
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Thomas Stevenson was educated at the Royal High School in Edinburgh.
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Thomas Stevenson was a devout and regular attendee at St Stephen's Church in Stockbridge, at the north end of St Vincent Street, Edinburgh.
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Thomas Stevenson lived with his family at Baxters Place until he got married in 1848.
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Thomas Stevenson then got a house at 8 Howard Place.
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In 1869, as a successful experiment into using the newly invented electric light for lighthouses, Stevenson had an underwater cable installed from the eastern part of Granton Harbour, and a light on the end of the Trinity Chain Pier was controlled from half a mile away by an operator on the harbour.
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Thomas Stevenson designed the Stevenson screen as a shelter to shield meteorological instruments, and this has been widely adopted.
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Thomas Stevenson died at 17 Heriot Row in Edinburgh on 8 May 1887 and is buried in the Stevenson family vault in New Calton Cemetery.
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Thomas Stevenson developed this into the simple formula, in which is the wave height in feet and is the fetch in miles.
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Thomas Stevenson's analysis is possibly the first quantitative discussion of wave height as a function of fetch, and his paper is one of the first quantitative studies of wind speeds in the planetary boundary layer.
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Nonetheless, whilst Thomas Stevenson's formula is highly limited and unsuitable for engineering design application, it was notable for being an early attempt to apply mathematical theory to hydraulic engineering problems, and shows some limited agreement with a more advanced formula developed by Ramon Iribarren in 1942.
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Thomas Stevenson himself noted that the formula was an approximation, and actively encouraged further research into similar problems, imploring young engineers to redouble efforts in the advancement of coastal engineering during an 1885 address to the Institution of Civil Engineers in London.
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Thomas Stevenson designed and supervised the construction of a breakwater at Wick in 1863, which at the time was the largest herring fishery in Europe.
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The inner harbour, designed by Thomas Stevenson Telford, was completed in 1811, followed by the construction of the expanded outer harbour by James Bremner between 1825 and 1834.
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Thomas Stevenson's design featured a rubble mound extending to 5.5 metres above the low water mark, following the Crane Rocks.
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Thomas Stevenson noted, in correspondence with the Institution of Civil Engineers, that a single storm had at one stage removed 1,350 tonnes of material from the breakwater, but he was unable to provide the height of the waves during the event.
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Thomas Stevenson was brother of the lighthouse engineers Alan and David Stevenson, between 1854 and 1886 he designed many lighthouses, with his brother David, and then with David's son David Alan Stevenson.
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Thomas Stevenson married Margaret Isabella "Maggie" Balfour in 1848, daughter of Rev Lewis Balfour.