John Milne (30 December 1850 – 31 July 1913)[1][2] was a British geologist and mining engineer who worked on a horizontal seismograph.

[6] In December 1873 Milne accompanied Dr Charles Tilstone Beke on an expedition to determine the true location of Mount Sinai in northwest Arabia.

Milne was hired by the Meiji government of the Empire of Japan as a foreign advisor and professor of mining and geology at the Imperial College of Engineering in Tokyo from 8 March 1876, where he worked under Henry Dyer and with William Edward Ayrton and John Perry.

In 1880, Sir Alfred Ewing, Thomas Gray, and John Milne, all British scientists working in Japan, began to study earthquakes following a very large tremor which struck the Yokohama area that year.

Soon after his arrival he learned that the Emperor had conferred upon him a rare distinction, The Third Grade of the Order of the Rising Sun and a life pension of 1,000 yen.

For northeastern Japan proper, he supported the tradition which ascribed prehistoric sites to the Ainu, who lived in pits and made stone implements and pottery.

With his wife Katherine, Routledge worked in the early twentieth century in East Africa with the Kikuyu and on Easter Island (Rapa Nui).

His network initially included seven in England, three in Russia, two in Canada (one in Toronto and one in Victoria, British Columbia), three on the east coast of the United States, and one in Antarctica, eventually growing to total forty worldwide.

The need for international exchange of readings was soon recognised by Milne in his annual "Shide Circular Reports on Earthquakes" published from 1900 to 1912.