OBITUARY NOTICES OF FELLOWS DECEASED. 



Amongst the men who have laboured earnestly and successfully to 

 place on a sound scientific basis the practice of engineering, the late 

 accomplished occupant of the Chair of Engineering at the University 

 of Edinburgh, Henry Charles Fleeming Jenkin, will hold a dis- 

 tinguished place. Born in Kent on the 25th March, 1833, the only 

 son of Captain Charles Jenkin, R.N., he was sent to school in 

 Scotland at the early age of seven years, where, under Dr. Burnett, of 

 Jedburgh, for three years, and after that for three years in the Edin- 

 burgh Academy, the first six years of his school life were spent. In 

 1846 he was placed at a school in Frankfort ; in 1847 he was for a 

 time in Paris ; and, finally, in 1850, he graduated as a Master of Arts 

 at the University of Genoa. 



He began his training as an engineer in a locomotive workshop at 

 Genoa, under Philip Taylor, of Marseilles, where he remained for 

 about a year. He returned to England in 1851, and served a three 

 years' apprenticeship in the works of the Fairbairns, of Manchester. 

 After a varied experience of practical work, Mr. Jenkin, in 1857, 

 entered the service of Messrs. Newall, in their submarine cable 

 factory at Birkenhead, where they were then engaged in the manufac- 

 ture of a part of the first Atlantic cable, and afterwards of cables for 

 the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. His energy and talents very 

 soon obtained for him the position of chief of the engineering and 

 electrical staff. In this connexion Jenkin was brought into close 

 relation with the able engineers and electricians who were then work- 

 ing out to a practical result the great problem of submarine tele- 

 graphy. These circumstances determined the direction in which his 

 energies were more especially to be applied, and he became early 

 known as an electrical engineer of high standing. 



At the beginning of 1859 he became known to Sir William 

 Thomson, and entered into constant correspondence with him in con- 

 nexion with the testing of conductivity and insulation of submarine 

 cables, and the speed of signalling through them. After Faraday's 

 discovery of the existence of specific inductive capacity, and his now 

 celebrated, though then ignored, determinations of it for flint glass, 

 shell-lac, and sulphur, the first correct determination of the specific 

 inductive capacity of any substance was made by Jenkin by means 

 of observations arranged for the purpose on some of the submarine 

 cables in the factory at Birkenhead. 



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