James Thomson (engineer)

Biography

Born in Belfast, much of his youth was spent in Glasgow. His father James was professor of mathematics at the University of Glasgow from 1832 onward and his younger brother William was to become Baron Kelvin. James attended Glasgow University from a young age and graduated (1839) with high honours in his late teens. After graduation, he served brief apprenticeships with practical engineers in several domains; and then gave a considerable amount of his time to theoretical and mathematical engineering studies, often in collaboration with his brother, during his twenties in Glasgow. In his late twenties he entered into private practice as a professional engineer with special expertise in water transport. In his early thirties, in 1855, he was appointed professor of civil engineering at Queen's University Belfast. He remained there until 1873, when he accepted the Regius professorship of Civil Engineering and Mechanics at the University of Glasgow (in which post he was successor to the influential William Rankine) until he resigned with failing eyesight in 1889.

In 1875 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. His proposers were his younger brother William Thomson, Peter Guthrie Tait, Alexander Crum Brown, and John Hutton Balfour. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London in June 1877.

He served as President of the Institution of Engineers and Shipbuilders in Scotland from 1884 to 1886.

In later life he lived at 2 Florentine Gardens, off Hillhead Street.

He died of cholera in Glasgow on 8 May 1892. He is buried on the northern slopes of the Glasgow Necropolis overlooking Glasgow Cathedral. One obituary described Thomson as “a man of singular purity of mind and simplicity of character“, whose “gentle kindness and unfailing courtesy will be long remembered.”