Thomas Stevenson

Marine Engineer | Number 17

Thomas Stevenson (1818 – 1887) was an outstanding marine engineer, responsible for building many of the lighthouses round Scotland’s coast. He was also an early meteorologist.

Scotland’s 6,100 miles of coastline, noted for jagged rocks and strong currents, made travel by ship perilous. Through the eighteenth and nineteenth her seaways became more congested, the frequent wrecks more and more damaging.  Scotland looked east to the Baltic and west to the Americas to trade. Emigration to the United States and Canada grew.  Herring fishing and whaling were major industries. Naval defences demanded safe passage. The Western and Northern Isles could only be reached and provisioned by ship.

Thomas joined his father and brother in the family firm in 1836. He and his brother were responsible for building fifty eight beacons and lighthouses, many of them in the most wild and precarious situations.  He also built many harbour defences.

His impact went well beyond practical construction.  He wrote the classic texts on the design and construction of harbours and the construction and illumination of lighthouses. His company provided advice on lighthouses and sea defences across the globe – in India, China, Canada, Japan and New Zealand.

He was an investigative scientist, with some 60 articles to his credit. One of these - a system for calculating the force of sea waves – was in practical use for at least a century.  His technical innovations in lighthouse illumination were of worldwide significance.

His interests extended to weather.  He helped found the Scottish Meteorological Society in 1855 and later served as its honorary secretary. His innovations in that field included a screen for protecting thermometers, the use of barometric gradients, and the vertical graduation of atmospheric pressure, temperature and humidity.

Given Thomas’s failed effort to persuade his own son Robert Louis into the family firm, and Robert Louis’s later literary success, it is interesting that Thomas himself had wanted to become a writer of fiction and had been dissuaded by his father’s injunction to ’give up such nonsense and mind your business’.


He and his brother were responsible for building fifty eight beacons and lighthouses, many of them in the most wild and precarious situations