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Professor HENRY CHARLES FLEEMING JENKIN. By W. H. P. 
Professor Henry Charles Fleeming Jenkin, only child of Captain 
Charles Jenkin, R.U., of Stowling Court, Kent, and his wife (Cora 
Jackson), a Scotchwoman and a novelist of some mark, was horn 
in Kent on the 25th of March 1833. Fleeming Jenkin was at the 
age of seven taken to Scotland, when he went to Dr Burnett's 
school at Jedburgh. There he stayed for three years, and then for 
other three years attended the Edinburgh Academy. In 1847 he 
went to school in Paris, where he saw the Revolution of 1848, of 
which he was wont to give vivid and interesting descriptions; and 
after the June riots he left for Italy, where he attended the Univer- 
sity of Genoa in the Arts Faculty, taking his degree as Master of 
Arts in 1850. It was at Genoa also, in a locomotive shop, that he 
began his distinguished career as an engineer, under Philip Taylor 
of Marseilles. In 1851 he returned to England, and was apprenticed 
to Fairbairn’s in Manchester for three years. His first practical 
work was done under Mr Hemans, on a survey for the Lukmanier 
Railway, in Switzerland ; then he went to Messrs Penn at Green- 
wich ; and then to Messrs Liddell & Gordon, in railway work. 
Thence he went to Messrs Kewall (Birkenhead), while they were 
engaged on making the first Atlantic cable in 1857. He was very 
soon entrusted with the chief management of the Messrs Ne wall's 
engineering and electrical business. His work included superin- 
tendence of machine construction in the factory, the designing of 
picking-up and paying-out machinery, the fitting up of steamships 
for submarine cables and the electrical testing. This work he 
continued to do during the making of part of the first Atlantic 
cable, of the Red Sea cable, of a cable from Singapore to Batavia, 
and of several Mediterranean cables. In 1859, the year of his 
marriage with Ann, daughter of the late Mr Alfred Austin, C.B., 
he was elected Associate I.C.E., and began to write on scientific 
subjects, encouraged thereto by Professor (now Sir William) 
Thomson, whom he had first known through Mr Gordon, of Liddell 
& Gordon. In 1860 he took out a patent jointly with Sir 
William Thomson for signalling apparatus through long submarine 
cables, and in 1861 he entered into a partnership, which lasted 
