Henry Charles Fleeming Jenkin FRS FRSE LLD (/ˈflɛmɪŋ/; 25 March 1833 – 12 June 1885) was Regius Professor of Engineering at the University of Edinburgh, remarkable for his versatility.

[3] In 1850, Jenkin spent some time in a Genoese locomotive shop under Philip Taylor of Marseille but on the death of his Aunt Anna, who lived with them, Captain Jenkin took his family back to England, and settled in Manchester, where the young man, in 1851, was apprenticed to mechanical engineering at the works of William Fairbairn, and from half-past eight in the morning until six at night had, as he says, "to file and chip vigorously, in a moleskin suit, and infernally dirty.

[5]: page 47 "At home he pursued his studies, and was for a time engaged with Dr. Bell in working out a geometrical method of arriving at the proportions of Ancient Greek architecture.

'"[5]: ¶ 11 "On leaving Fairbairn's he was engaged for a time on a survey for the proposed Lukmanier Railway in Switzerland, and in 1856 he entered Penn's engineering works at Greenwich as a draughtsman, being occupied on the plans of a vessel designed for the Crimean War.

He complained about the late hours, his rough comrades, and his humble lodgings, 'across a dirty green and through some half-built streets of two-storied houses.... Luckily, he adds, 'I am fond of my profession, or I could not stand this life.'

At night he read engineering and mathematics, or Thomas Carlyle and the poets, and cheered his drooping spirits with frequent trips to London to see his mother.

"[5]: ¶ 12 "Another social pleasure was his visits to the house of Alfred Austin, a barrister, who became permanent secretary to Her Majesty's Office of Works and Public Buildings, and retired in 1868 with the title of CB.

His wife, Eliza Barron, was the youngest daughter of a gentleman of Norwich who, when a child, had been patted on the head, in his father's shop, by Dr Samuel Johnson, while canvassing for Mr. Thrale.

Jenkin had been introduced to the Austins by a letter from Mrs. Gaskell, and was charmed with the atmosphere of their choice home, where intellectual conversation was happily united with kind and courteous manners, without any pretence or affectation.

"Each of the Austins," says Stevenson in his memoir of Jenkin, "was full of high spirits; each practised something of the same repression; no sharp word was uttered in the house."

It was a rare privilege and preservative for a solitary young man in Jenkin's position to have the entry into such elevating society and he appreciated his good fortune.

But I have a nice office to sit in, with a fire to myself, and bright brass scientific instruments all round me, and books to read, and experiments to make, and enjoy myself amazingly.

Earlier in 1855, John Watkins Brett had attempted to lay a cable across the Mediterranean between Cape Spartivento, in the south of Sardinia, and a point near Bona, on the coast of Algeria.

Meeting with 600 fathoms (1100 m) of water when twenty-five miles (45 km) from land, the cable ran out so fast that a tangled skein came up out of the hold and the line had to be severed.

She had a new machine for picking up the cable, and a sheave or pulley at the bows for it to run over, both designed by Jenkin, together with a variety of wooden buoys, ropes, and chains.

[6] During the latter part of the work much of the cable was found to be looped and twisted into 'kinks' from having been so slackly laid and two immense tangled skeins were raised on board, one by means of the mast-head and fore-yard tackle.

On the evening of the 2nd the first mate, while on the water unshackling a buoy, was struck in the back by a fluke of the ship's anchor as she drifted, and so severely injured that he lay for many weeks at Cagliari.

Jenkin's knowledge of languages made him useful as an interpreter but, in mentioning this incident to Miss Austin, he writes, For no fortune would I be a doctor to witness these scenes continually.

Lewis Gordon, of Newall & Co., subsequently the first professor of engineering in a British University, was in Glasgow seeing Thomson's instruments for testing and signalling on the first Atlantic cable during the six weeks of its working.

Robert Louis Stevenson says in his memoir of Jenkin that it was his principle to enjoy each day's happiness as it arises, like birds and children.

it was perfect; but the long walk, wondering, pondering, fearing, scheming, and the dusty jolting railway, and the horrid fusty office, with its endless disappointments, they are well gone.

In 1870 the siphon recorder for tracing a cablegram in ink instead of merely flashing it by the moving ray of the mirror galvanometer, was introduced on long cables and became a source of profit to Jenkin and Varley as well as to Thomson, its inventor.

The Hooper left Plymouth in June, and after touching at Madeira, where Thomson was up 'sounding with his special toy' (the pianoforte wire) 'at half-past three in the morning,' they reached Pernambuco by the beginning of August, and laid a cable to Pará.

While engaged in this work, the ill-fated La Plata, carrying cable from the Siemens AG company to Montevideo, sank in a cyclone off Ushant with the loss of nearly all her crew.

[15][16] "Jenkin acted as consulting engineer to the association without pay, rather, as he explained it, like a hospital for the poor where a leading physician would give his services free.

... [The Sanitary Protection Association] was simple, pragmatic, popular – within a few months, there were five hundred subscribers in Edinburgh, and similar groups quickly formed in other British cities ..."[1]: 165 Jenkin was a clear, fluent speaker, and a successful teacher.

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.

Aeschylus, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Ariosto, Boccaccio, Sir Walter Scott, Dumas, Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, and George Eliot were some of his favourite authors.

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.

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.