Cargill Gilston Knott (1856–1922): Mathematician, Physicist and Seismologist

PART V: SCIENTISTS

PAUL KABRNA

Cargill Gilston Knott1

SCOTLAND: BORN AND BRED Cargill Gilston Knott was born on 30 June 1856 at Valleyﬁ eld in Penicuik, Midlothian, a few miles south of Edinburgh. His father was Pelham Knott and his mother Helen Macintyre McOmish. Pelham died when Cargill was seven years old. Following the early loss of his father, the family sent Cargill to his uncle John Lurngaire, a justice of the peace and retired merchant. John Lurngaire lived at Union Villa in Arbroath where Knott was educated over eight years at the High School before continuing his studies at the University of Edinburgh. During Knott’s ﬁ rst year as a mathematics and natural philosophy undergraduate, he attended (and later wrote about) a Royal Society of Edinburgh (RSE) lecture given by fellow ‘madcap’ meteorologi- cal student Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894), later to become the world famous author. Stevenson’s lecture ‘On the Thermal

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Infl uence of Forests’2 which was read to the distinguished RSE audience on 19 May 1873 was his one and only scientifi c paper. On graduating from Edinburgh University in 1876, Knott worked as a laboratory research assistant to the Dalkeith-born Professor of Natural Philosophy, Peter Guthrie Tait (1831–1901). As an undergraduate student, Knott worked alongside fellow student scientist, James Alfred Ewing (1855–1935).3 He also studied geology under Sir Archibald Geikie (1834–1924), then and since 1871, Professor of Geology at Edinburgh University. Cargill Knott retained a strong interest in the many physical problems associated with both geological and geographical sciences. He worked on various aspects of electricity and magnetism, gaining a doctorate from his research in contact electricity in 1879. A year later, on 1 March 1880, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.4 Knott was just one of many promising Scottish scientists to have benefi ted from the collaboration between the University of Glasgow’s William Thomson (1824–1907) and Edinburgh’s P.G. Tait. Thomson (who in 1892 became Lord Kelvin) and Tait created a core around which British physics developed. On 2 February 1883, at the age of twenty-six, Cargill Knott co- founded the Edinburgh Mathematical Society (EMS).5 Knott took the chair at the inaugural meeting and served as the fi rst secretary and treasurer of the society. One of the chief aims of the EMS was to improve the way mathematics was taught in schools. Knott channelled a great deal of energy into the establishment of the EMS, enrolling new members, arranging programmes for meetings and in countless other ways, he enthusiastically worked on behalf of the young society. His name is known to many who were school pupils before the age of calculators through the publication of his booklet of four-fi gure mathematical tables. In 1883 on William Thomson’s recommendation, Knott succeeded Edinburgh colleague J. A. Ewing at the Imperial University in Tokyo as Professor of Physics and Engineering where he was to remain until 1891.

JAPAN (1883–1891) One of the articles of the Five Charter Oath issued by the Meiji Government in 1868 called for ‘the international search for knowl- edge to strengthen the foundations of imperial rule.’ This led to a large number of foreign specialists being invited to Japan to train Japanese for the social, political and economic development of their emerging nation. Knott was just one of many professionals invited from Britain and other countries. Ewing, who supported Knott’s appointment as Professor of Physics and Engineering at the

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