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James Patrick Muirhead
(25 Jul 1813 - 15 Oct 1898)
Scottish lawyer and author who was the biographer of the engineer James Watt. He wrote The life of James Watt, with selections from his correspondence (1858).
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Science Quotes by James Patrick Muirhead (2 quotes)
One of my inventions was a large thermometer made of an iron rod, … The expansion and contraction of this rod was multiplied by a series of levers … so that the slightest change in the length of the rod was instantly shown on a dial about three feet wide multiplied about thirty-two thousand times. The zero-point was gained by packing the rod in wet snow. The scale was so large that … the temperature read while we were ploughing in the field below the house.
— James Patrick Muirhead
From The Story of My Boyhood and Youth (1913), 258-259. One of the inventions made while growing up on his father’s farm, before he left the year after he was 21.
The respect which in all ages and countries has ever been paid to inventors seems, indeed, to rest on something more profound than mere gratitude for the benefits which they have been the means of conferring on mankind; and to imply, if it does not express, a consciousness that by the grand and original conceptions of their minds they approach somewhat more nearly than their fellows to the qualities and pre-eminence of a higher order of being.
— James Patrick Muirhead
The Origin and Progress of the Mechanical Inventions of James Watt (1854), Vol.1, 2.
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- 
