Fleeming Jenkin - Personality and Assessment

Personality and Assessment

Jenkin was a clear, fluent speaker, and a successful teacher. He is described as being of medium height, and very plain, with an unimposing manner. His class was always in good order, for he instantly spotted and disciplined anyone who misbehaved. His experimental work was not strikingly original. At Birkenhead he made some accurate measurements of the electrical properties of materials used in submarine cables. Sir William Thomson noted that he was the first to apply the absolute methods of measurement introduced by Gauss and Weber. He also investigated the laws of electric signals in submarine cables. As Secretary to the British Association Committee on Electrical Standards he played a leading part in providing electricians with practical standards of measurement. His Cantor lectures on submarine cables, and his treatise on Electricity and Magnetism, published in 1873, were notable at the time, including the latest developments in the subject. He was associated with Thomson in an ingenious 'curb-key' for sending signals automatically through a long cable; but it was never adopted. His most important invention was telpherage, a means of transporting goods and passengers to a distance by electric panniers supported on a wire or conductor, which supplied them with electricity. It was patented in 1882, and Jenkin spent his last years on this work, expecting great results from it; but before the first public line was opened for traffic at Glynde, in Sussex, he was dead.

In mechanical engineering his graphical methods of calculating strains in bridges, and determining the efficiency of mechanism, were valuable, and won him the Keith Gold Medal from the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He also founded the Sanitary Protection Association, for the supervision of houses with regard to health. In his spare time Jenkin wrote papers on a wide variety of subjects. He attacked Darwin's theory of development, and showed its inadequacy, especially in demanding more time than the physicist could grant for the age of the habitable world. Darwin confessed that some of his arguments were convincing; and Munro, the scholar, complimented him for his paper The Atomic Theory of Lucretius. In 1878 he constructed a phonograph from the newspaper reports of this new invention, and lectured on it in Edinburgh, then employed it to study the nature of vowel and consonantal sounds. An interesting paper on 'Rhythm in English Verse,' was also published by him in the Saturday Review for 1883.

He could draw a portrait with astonishing rapidity, and had been known to stop a passer-by for a few minutes and sketch her on the spot. His artistic side also shows itself in a paper on 'Artist and Critic,' in which he defines the difference between the mechanical and fine arts. 'In mechanical arts,' he says, 'the craftsman uses his skill to produce something useful, but (except in the rare case when he is at liberty to choose what he shall produce) his sole merit lies in skill. In the fine arts the student uses skill to produce something beautiful. He is free to choose what that something shall be, and the layman claims that he may and must judge the artist chiefly by the value in beauty of the thing done. Artistic skill contributes to beauty, or it would not be skill; but beauty is the result of many elements, and the nobler the art the lower is the rank which skill takes among them.'

Jenkin was a clear and graphic writer. He read selectively, preferring the story of David, the Odyssey, the Arcadia, the saga of Burnt Njal, and the Grand Cyrus. Aeschylus, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Ariosto, Boccaccio, Sir Walter Scott, Dumas, Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, and George Eliot were some of his favourite authors. He was a rapid, fluent talker. Some of his sayings were shrewd and sharp; but he was sometimes aggressive. 'People admire what is pretty in an ugly thing,' he used to say 'not the ugly thing.' A lady once said to him she would never be happy again. 'What does that signify?' cried Jenkin ; 'we are not here to be happy, but to be good.' On a friend remarking that Salvini's acting in Othello made him want to pray, Jenkin answered, 'That is prayer.'

Though admired and liked by his intimates, Jenkin was never popular with associates. His manner was hard, rasping, and unsympathetic. 'Whatever virtues he possessed,' says Mr. Stevenson, 'he could never count on being civil.' He showed so much courtesy to his wife, however, that a Styrian peasant who observed it spread a report in the village that Mrs. Jenkin, a great lady, had married beneath her. At the Savile Club, in London, he was known as the 'man who dines here and goes up to Scotland.' Jenkin was conscious of this churlishness, and latterly improved. 'All my life,' he wrote,'I have talked a good deal, with the almost unfailing result of making people sick of the sound of my tongue. It appeared to me that I had various things to say, and I had no malevolent feelings; but, nevertheless, the result was that expressed above. Well, lately some change has happened. If I talk to a person one day they must have me the next. Faces light up when they see me. "Ah! I say, come here." " Come and dine with me." It's the most preposterous thing I ever experienced. It is curiously pleasant.'

Jenkin was a good father, joining in his children's play as well as directing their studies. The boys used to wait outside his office for him at the close of business hours; and a story is told of little Frewen, the second son, entering in to him one day, while he was at work, and holding out a toy crane he was making, with the request, 'Papa you might finiss windin' this for me, I'm so very busy to-day.' He was fond of animals too, and his dog Plate regularly accompanied him to the University. But, as he used to say, 'It's a cold home where a dog is the only representative of a child.'

In the Highlands, Jenkin learned to love the Highland character and ways of life. He shot, rode and swam well, and taught his boys athletic exercises, boating, salmon fishing, and so on. He learned to dance a Highland reel, and began the study of Gaelic; but it proved too difficult even for Jenkin. Once he took his family to Alt Aussee, in the Steiermark (Styria), where he hunted chamois, won a prize for shooting at the Schützenfest, learned the local dialect, sketched the neighbourhood, and danced the steirischen Ländler with the peasants.

His parents and parents-in-law had come to live in Edinburgh, but they all died within ten months of each other. Jenkin had showed great devotion to them in their illnesses, and was worn out with grief and watching. His telpherage, too, had given him considerable anxiety; and his mother's illness, which affected her mind, had caused him fear. He was planning a holiday to Italy with his wife in order to recuperate, and had a minor operation on his foot, which resulted in blood poisoning. There seemed to be no danger, and his wife was reading aloud to him as he lay in bed, when his mind began to wander. He probably never regained his senses before he died.

At one period of his life Jenkin was a freethinker, holding all dogmas as 'mere blind struggles to express the inexpressible.' Nevertheless, as time went on he returned to Christianity. 'The longer I live,' he wrote, 'the more convinced I become of a direct care by God--which is reasonably impossible—but there it is.' In his last year he took Communion.