John Scott Russell
John Scott Russell was a Scottish civil engineer, naval architect and shipbuilder who built Great Eastern in collaboration with Isambard Kingdom Brunel. He made the discovery of the wave of translation that gave birth to the modern study of solitons, and developed the wave-line system of ship construction.
Russell was a promoter of the Great Exhibition of 1851.
Early life
John Russell was born on the 9th May 1808 with in Parkhead, Glasgow, the son of Reverend David Russell and Agnes Clark Scott. He spent one year at the University of St. Andrews before transferring to the University of Glasgow. It was while at the University of Glasgow that he added his mother's maiden name, Scott, to his own, to become John Scott Russell. He graduated from Glasgow University in 1825 at the age of 17 and moved to Edinburgh where he taught mathematics and science at the Leith Mechanics' Institute, achieving the highest attendance in the city.On the death of Sir John Leslie, Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh in 1832, Scott Russell, though only 24 years old, was elected to temporarily fill the vacancy pending the election of a permanent professor, due to his proficiency in the natural sciences and popularity as a lecturer. But although encouraged to stand for the permanent position he refused to compete with another candidate he admired and thereafter concentrated the engineering profession and experimental research on a large scale.
Family life
Russell's first wife was Frances Granville Downes of Ann Street in Stockbridge, Edinburgh, whom he married on April 17th 1832 St John’s Episcopal Church, Edinburgh. Frances was the eldest daughter of Major Charles Downes of the Veteran Battalion. Unfortunately, Frances died a year later on 23rd April 1833, aged only 20, and is buried in St John’s churchyard with other Downes relatives.He married Harriette Osborne, daughter of the Irish baronet Sir Daniel Toler Osborne and Harriette Trench, daughter of the Earl of Clancarty in Dublin in 1839; they had two sons and three daughters, Louise, Rachel and Alice. In London they lived for five years in a house provided for the secretary of the Society of Arts and then moved to Sydenham Hill, which became a centre of attention especially after Russell and his friends moved Paxton's glasshouse for the Great Exhibition to the Crystal Palace close by.
Arthur Sullivan and his friend Frederic Clay were frequent visitors at the Scott Russell home in the mid-1860s; Clay became engaged to Alice, and Sullivan wooed Rachel. While Clay was from a wealthy family, Sullivan was still a poor young composer from a poor family; the Scott Russells welcomed the engagement of Alice to Clay, who, however broke it off, but forbade the relationship between Sullivan and Rachel, although the two continued to see each other covertly. At some point in 1868, Sullivan started a simultaneous affair with Louise. Both relationships had ceased by early 1869.
The American engineer Alexander Lyman Holley befriended Scott Russell and his family on his various visits to London at the time of the construction of Great Eastern. Holley also visited Scott Russell's house in Sydenham. As a result of this, Holley, and his colleague Zerah Colburn, travelled on the maiden voyage of Great Eastern from Southampton to New York in June 1860. Scott Russell's son, Norman, stayed with Holley at his house in Brooklyn — Norman also travelled on the maiden voyage, one voyage that John Scott Russell did not make.
His son, Norman, followed his father in becoming a naval architect, contributing to the Institution of Naval Architects which his father had founded.
Steam carriage
While in Edinburgh he experimented with steam engines, using a square boiler for which he developed a method of staying the surface of the boiler which became universal. The Scottish Steam Carriage Company was formed producing a steam carriage with two cylinders developing 12 horsepower each. Six were constructed in 1834, well-sprung and fitted out to high standard, which from March 1834 ran between Glasgow's George Square and the Tontine Hotel in Paisley at hourly intervals at 15 mph. The road trustees objected that it wore out the road and placed various obstructions of logs and stones in the road, which actually caused more discomfort for horse-drawn carriages. But in July 1834 one of the carriages was overturned and the boiler smashed, causing the death of several passengers. Two of the coaches were sent to London where they ran for a short time between London and Greenwich.The wave of translation
In 1834, while conducting experiments to determine the most efficient design for canal boats, he discovered a phenomenon that he described as the wave of translation. In fluid dynamics the wave is now called Russell's solitary wave. The discovery is described here in his own words:I was observing the motion of a boat which was rapidly drawn along a narrow channel by a pair of horses, when the boat suddenly stopped—not so the mass of water in the channel which it had put in motion; it accumulated round the prow of the vessel in a state of violent agitation, then suddenly leaving it behind, rolled forward with great velocity, assuming the form of a large solitary elevation, a rounded, smooth and well-defined heap of water, which continued its course along the channel apparently without change of form or diminution of speed. I followed it on horseback, and overtook it still rolling on at a rate of some eight or nine miles an hour , preserving its original figure some thirty feet long and a foot to a foot and a half in height. Its height gradually diminished, and after a chase of one or two miles I lost it in the windings of the channel. Such, in the month of August 1834, was my first chance interview with that singular and beautiful phenomenon which I have called the Wave of Translation.
The phenomenon of solitary waves had previously been reported in 1826 by Giorgio Bidone in Turin, but Bidone's work seems to have gone unnoticed by researchers in the Netherlands and Britain, despite being mentioned in the Edinburgh Journal of Science in the same year.
Scott Russell spent some time making practical and theoretical investigations of these waves. He built wave tanks at his home and noticed some key properties:
- The waves are stable, and can travel over very large distances
- The speed depends on the size of the wave, and its width on the depth of water.
- Unlike normal waves they will never merge—so a small wave is overtaken by a large one, rather than the two combining.
- If a wave is too big for the depth of water, it splits into two, one big and one small.
A Dutch translation of Bazin's work entitled Verslag aan de Fransche academie van wetenschappen over het gedeelte der verhandeling van Bazin, betrekkelijk de opstuwingen en de voortbeweging der golven was featured in the proceedings of the Dutch Koninklijk Instituut van Ingenieurs in 1869. Within the original French paper, and the translated work, the velocity of a solitary wave is given as:
The formula is denoted as "the law of Scott Russell" within the text. His contemporaries spent some time attempting to extend the theory but it would take until the 1870s before an explanation was provided.
Lord Rayleigh published a paper in Philosophical Magazine in 1876 to support John Scott Russell's experimental observation with his mathematical theory. In his 1876 paper, Lord Rayleigh mentioned Scott Russell's name and also admitted that the first theoretical treatment was by Joseph Valentin Boussinesq in 1871; Boussinesq had mentioned Scott Russell's name in his 1871 paper. Thus Scott Russell's observations on solitary waves were accepted as true by some prominent scientists within his own lifetime.
Korteweg and de Vries did not mention John Scott Russell's name at all in their 1895 paper but they did quote Boussinesq's paper in 1871 and Lord Rayleigh's paper in 1876. Although the paper by Korteweg and de Vries in 1895 was not the first theoretical treatment of this subject, it was a very important milestone in the history of the development of soliton theory.
It was not until the 1960s and the advent of modern computers that the significance of Scott Russell's discovery in physics, electronics, biology and especially fibre optics started to become understood, leading to the modern general theory of solitons.
Note that solitons are, by definition, unaltered in shape and speed by a collision with other solitons. So solitary waves on a water surface are not solitons – after the interaction of two solitary waves, they have changed slightly in amplitude and an oscillatory residual is left behind.
Wave line system
Once Russell had a way of observing boats at hitherto unprecedented speeds at the front of his wave of translation, he tackled the more fundamental issue for boat design of finding the hull shape which gives the least resistance. This, he reasoned was concerned with moving the mass of water efficiently out of the way of the hull and then back to fill the gap after it has passed. By careful measurements with dynamometers he validated his theory that a versed sine wave produces the ideal shape.Initially he thought that the stern could be a mirror of the stem, but soon realised that the removing water produced something closer to conventional waves than his solitary waves and ended up with a rounded stern with a catenary shape.
His studies produced a revolution in the design of hulls for merchant and navy vessels. Most ships of the time had rounded bows to optimise the cargo-carrying capacity, but starting from the 1840s the "extreme clipper ships" started to show concave bows as increasingly did steam ships culminating with Great Eastern. After his views were propounded by Commander Fishbourne, the American naval architect John W. Griffiths acknowledged the force of Russell's work in his Treatise on marine and naval architecture of 1850 though he was grudging in acknowledging a debt to Russell.