SCOTLAND’S STAR MAN
Robert Stirling was born in 1790 at Cloag Farm, Methven, near Perth, to a middle-class family of tenant farmers and lived through the first and second industrial revolutions when ingenuity prevailed. He was a student at both Edinburgh and Glasgow universities, reading divinity at the latter, but his studies also included the sciences of mechanics, hydrodynamics, astronomy, optics, electricity and magnetism and, it’s thought, heat.
In 1815, he became a probationary minister, at the same time inventing the engine that converted the heat from a coal fire into motion by expanding and contracting air. A year later he moved to
Laigh Kirk in Kilmarnock and was ordained on September 19. A week after his ordination, Stirling lodged the patent application for his heat exchanger and engine.
Author Phillip Hills, an 80-year-old father and grandfather, and founder of the Scotch Malt Whisky Society, said: “Dr Stirling was married and had five of a family. He moved from Kilmarnock to Galston, Ayrshire, where his parishioners loved him. But they couldn’t understand why late at night fires and strange noises would come from the workshop next to the manse. In his spare time he was a brilliant engineer.”
The National Museum of Scotland holds the earliest known example of a Stirling engine, one of only two working models in existence. It was presented to Edinburgh University by Stirling no later than 1825 with a second gifted to Glasgow University in 1827 and on display in the Hunterian.
Hills said: “Part of my intention of writing the book was to waken people to their importance.”