Robert William ThomsonPRSSAFRSE (29 June 1822 – 8 March 1873) was a Scottish inventor known for inventing the refillable fountain pen and the pneumatictyre.[1]
Life
Thomson's house (right) at 3 Moray Place, Edinburgh
He was born on 29 June 1822[2] in Stonehaven in the northeast of Scotland, He was baptised into the Church of Scotland on 26 July 1822. Robert was the eleventh of twelve children of a local woolen mill owner. His family wished him to study for the ministry, but Robert refused, one reason being his inability to master Latin. Robert left school es, where he was apprenticed to a merchant. Two years later he returned home and taught himself chemistry, electricity and astronomy with the help of a local weaver who had knowledge of mathematics.
Robert's father gave him a workshop, and by the time he was 17 years old he had rebuilt his mother's washing mangle so that the wet linen could be passed through the rollers in either direction, and had completed the first working model of his elliptic rotary steam engine which he perfected in later life. He served an engineering apprenticeship in Aberdeen and Dundee before joining a civil engineering company in Glasgow. He then went to work for an Edinburgh firm of civil engineers where he devised a new method of detonating explosive charges by the use of electricity, thus greatly reducing the loss of lives in mines throughout the world.
Thomson next worked as a railway engineer and supervised the blasting of chalk cliffs near Dover for the South Eastern Railway. Soon he set up his own railway consultancy business and proposed the line for the Eastern Counties Railway which was accepted by Parliament and eventually developed.
Thomson was 23 years old when he patented his pneumatic tyre. He was granted a patent in France in 1846 and in the US in 1847.[3] His tyre consisted of a hollow belt of India-rubber inflated with air so that the wheels presented "a cushion of air to the ground, rail or track on which they run". This elastic belt of rubberized canvas was enclosed within a strong outer casing of leather which was bolted to the wheel. Thomson's "Aerial Wheels" were demonstrated in London's Regent's Park in March 1847 and were fitted to several horse-drawn carriages, greatly improving the comfort of travel and reducing noise. One set ran for 1200 miles without a sign of deterioration.
He amassed a large sum from his inventions and lived in a huge townhouse at 3 Moray Place on the Moray Estate in west Edinburgh.[6]
He died at home in Edinburgh on 8 March 1873 aged 50. He was buried in Dean Cemetery in west Edinburgh on the path leading from the centre of the cemetery to the south-west.
The grave of Robert William Thomson, Dean Cemetery
