thumb|Drawing of the first ever [[aerial tramway or telpher, designed and engineered by Fleeming Jenkin. It was installed in Glynde in Sussex in 1885 to transport clay, and was finished after Jenkin's death.]]

Henry Charles Fleeming Jenkin FRS FRSE (; 25 March 1833 – 12 June 1885)<!--full dates in infobox, per MOS--> was a British engineer, inventor, economist, linguist, actor and dramatist known as the inventor of the cable car or telpherage. He was Regius Professor of Engineering at the University of Edinburgh. His descendants include the engineer Charles Frewen Jenkin and through him the Conservative MPs Patrick, Lord Jenkin of Roding and Bernard Jenkin.

Early life

thumb|330px|Plaque to Fleeming Jenkin, King's Buildings, Edinburgh

Background and childhood

Generally called Fleeming Jenkin, named after Admiral Fleeming, one of his father's patrons, he was born to an old and eccentric family in a government building near Dungeness, Kent, England. His father, Captain Charles Jenkin, was at that time being in the coast-guard service. His mother was responsible for Jenkin's education. She took him to the south of Scotland, where, chiefly at Barjarg, she taught him drawing and allowed him to ride his pony on the moors. He went to school at Jedburgh, Borders, and afterwards to the Edinburgh Academy, where he won many prizes. Among his school fellows were James Clerk Maxwell and Peter Guthrie Tait.

On his father's retirement in 1847, the family moved to Frankfurt, partly from motives of economy and partly for the boy's education. Here Jenkin and his father spent a pleasant time together, sketching old castles, and observing the customs of the peasantry. At thirteen, Jenkin had produced a romance of three hundred lines in heroic couplets, a novel, and a large number of poems, none of which are now extant. He learned German in Frankfurt and, on the family migrating to Paris the following year, he studied French and mathematics under a M. Deluc. While there, Jenkin witnessed the outbreak of the Revolution of 1848 and heard the first shot, describing the action in a letter written to an old schoolfellow.

The Jenkins left Paris, and went to Genoa, where they experienced another revolution, and Mrs. Jenkin, with her son and sister-in-law, had to seek the protection of a British vessel in the harbour, leaving their house stored with the property of their friends, and guarded by Captain Jenkin. At Genoa, Jenkin attended the University of Genoa, being its first Protestant student. Father Bancalari, the professor of natural philosophy, lectured on electromagnetism, his physical laboratory being the best in Italy. Jenkin took the degree of M.A. with first-class honours, his special subject having been electromagnetism. The questions in the examinations were in Latin, and had to be answered in Italian. Fleeming also attended an art school in the city, and gained a silver medal for a drawing from one of Raphael's cartoons. His holidays were spent in sketching, and his evenings in learning to play the piano or, when permissible, at the theatre or opera-house. He had conceived a taste for acting. He attended the University of Edinburgh in 1851.

"On leaving Fairbairn's he was engaged for a time on a survey for the proposed Lukmanier Railway in Switzerland, and in 1856 he entered Penn's engineering works at Greenwich as a draughtsman, being occupied on the plans of a vessel designed for the Crimean War. He complained about the late hours, his rough comrades, and his humble lodgings, 'across a dirty green and through some half-built streets of two-storied houses.... Luckily, he adds, 'I am fond of my profession, or I could not stand this life.' Jenkin had been his mother's pet until then, and felt the change from home more keenly for that reason. At night he read engineering and mathematics, or Thomas Carlyle and the poets, and cheered his drooping spirits with frequent trips to London to see his mother."

During the latter part of the work much of the cable was found to be looped and twisted into 'kinks' from having been so slackly laid and two immense tangled skeins were raised on board, one by means of the mast-head and fore-yard tackle. Photographs of this raveled cable were exhibited as a curiosity in the windows of Newall & Co.'s shop in The Strand. By 5 July the whole of the six-wire cable had been recovered and a portion of the three-wire cable, the rest being abandoned as unfit for use, owing to its twisted condition. On the evening of the 2nd the first mate, while on the water unshackling a buoy, was struck in the back by a fluke of the ship's anchor as she drifted, and so severely injured that he lay for many weeks at Cagliari. Jenkin's knowledge of languages made him useful as an interpreter but, in mentioning this incident to Miss Austin, he writes, For no fortune would I be a doctor to witness these scenes continually. Pain is a terrible thing.

Entrepreneur and academic

Partnership with Forde

"In 1861, Jenkin left the service of Newall & Co. and entered into partnership with H. C. Forde, who had acted as engineer under the British Government for the Malta-Alexandria cable, and was now practising as a civil engineer. For several years, business was bad."

With a young family coming, it was an anxious time but he bore his troubles lightly. Robert Louis Stevenson says in his memoir of Jenkin that it was his principle to enjoy each day's happiness as it arises, like birds and children.

In 1863 his first son was born and the family moved to a cottage at Claygate near Esher. Though ill and poor, he kept up his self-confidence. The country, he wrote to his wife, will give us, please God, health and strength. I will love and cherish you more than ever. You shall go where you wish, you shall receive whom you wish, and as for money, you shall have that too. I cannot be mistaken. I have now measured myself with many men. I do not feel weak. I do not feel that I shall fail. In many things I have succeeded, and I will in this.... And meanwhile, the time of waiting, which, please Heaven, shall not be so long, shall also not be so bitter. Well, well, I promise much, and do not know at this moment how you and the dear child are. If he is but better, courage, my girl, for I see light.) of engineering at University College London. Two years later his prospects suddenly

improved. The partnership began to pay and he was selected to fill the newly established Regius Chair of Engineering at Edinburgh University. He wrote to his wife: 'With you in the garden (at Claygate), with Austin in the coach-house, with pretty songs in the little low white room, with the moonlight in the dear room upstairs—ah! it was perfect; but the long walk, wondering, pondering, fearing, scheming, and the dusty jolting railway, and the horrid fusty office, with its endless disappointments, they are well gone. It is well enough to fight, and scheme, and bustle about in the eager crowd here (in London) for a while now and then; but not for a lifetime. What I have now is just perfect. Study for winter, action for summer, lovely country for recreation, a pleasant town for talk.'" in which he "introduced the diagrammatic method into the English economic literature" – an early published instance of supply and demand curves. His treatment extended beyond earlier treatments on the Continent (not apparently known by him), complete with comparative statics (a change in equilibrium from a shifts of a curve), welfare analysis, application to the labour market, and market-period and long-run distinctions. It was later popularised by Alfred Marshall and remains arguably the most famous graphic in economics.

Sanitary protection associations

In 1878 Jenkin made a contribution to public health with his pamphlet Healthy Houses. "This was not a completely new interest, for sewerage systems were part of the degree course which he taught, and he had already contributed on the subject to the Sanitary Record." noted two associations in London in 1882, and sixteen globally.

"Jenkin acted as consulting engineer to the association without pay, rather, as he explained it, like a hospital for the poor where a leading physician would give his services free. ... [The Sanitary Protection Association] was simple, pragmatic, popular – within a few months, there were five hundred subscribers in Edinburgh, and similar groups quickly formed in other British cities ..." Jenkin criticized Darwin's evolutionary theory by suggesting that Darwin's interpretation of natural selection couldn't possibly work, as described, if the reigning hypothesis of inheritance, blending inheritance, was also valid. Though Gregor Mendel's theory of particulate inheritance had been already published two years earlier (and would eventually be adopted as the dominant theory of inheritance), neither Jenkin nor Darwin would ever read it, and it would still be several decades before the blending inheritance model would be overturned in the scientific community. In this interim, Jenkin provided a mathematical argument, the swamping argument, that showed that under the blending inheritance model any advantageous mutations which might arise in a species would be quickly diluted out of any species after just a few generations. By contrast, Darwin's interpretation of natural selection required hundreds, if not thousands of generations of passing down such mutations in order to work. Jenkin thus concluded that natural selection could not possibly work if blending inheritance were also true. Despite Jenkin's argument containing a mistake, as A.S. Davis pointed out in 1871, it did not affect Jenkin's conclusion, nor mitigate the damage of Jenkin's criticisms of Darwin's ideas during the few decades when blending inheritance was still widely accepted.

Jenkin also referred to Lord Kelvin's recent (incorrect) estimation of the age of the earth. Kelvin had calculated that Fourier's theory of heat and the actions of tides on the earth's rotation allowed for an earth no more than 100 million years old and doubted in so far the case for evolution based on the chronology. Criticism by Jenkin and A.W. Bennett, in fact, led Darwin to investigate and discuss the mechanism of inheritance more thoroughly. Darwin avoided a direct confrontation (as well in the case of chronology), but confessed that some of Jenkin's arguments were troubling—so troubling, in fact, that Darwin largely abandoned blending inheritance as the potential mechanism for his own inheritance model, pangenesis, in favor of a competing model of inheritance that derived from Lamarckism.

Selected works of Fleeming Jenkin

  • 1868: The Atomic Theory of Lucretius, North British Review, link from Wikisource.
  • 1868. "Trades Unions: How Far Legitimate?" North British Review, March. (see Papers, Literary, Scientific &c, volume 2).
  • 1870. "The Graphical Representation of the Laws of Supply and Demand, and their Application to Labour," in Alexander Grant, ed., Recess Studies, ch. VI, pp.&nbsp;151–85. Edinburgh. Scroll to chapter link.
  • 1872. On the principles which regulate the incidence of taxes, Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh 1871-2, pp.&nbsp;618–30.
  • 1877: (with J.A. Ewing) On Friction between Surfaces moving at Low Speeds, Philosophical Magazine Series 5, volume 4, pp 308–10, link from Biodiversity Heritage Library.
  • 1887: Sydney Colvin & James Alfred Ewing editors, Papers, Literary, Scientific, &c, volume 1, preview from Google Books.
  • 1887: S.C. Colvin & J.A. Ewing editors, Papers, Literary, Scientific, &c, v. 2
  • 1873: Electricity and Magnetism (first edition), link from HathiTrust, other editions in 1876,79,80,81,85,87,1914.
  • 1873 (editor) Reports of the Committee on Electrical Standards appointed by the British Association for the Advancement of Science link from HathiTrust.
  • undated: "History of Bridges", Encyclopædia Britannica