John Scott Russell (9 May 1808, Parkhead, Glasgow – 8 June 1882, Ventnor, Isle of Wight) was a Scottish civil engineer, naval architect and shipbuilder who built Great Eastern in collaboration with Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

He made the discovery of the wave of translation that gave birth to the modern study of solitons, and developed the wave-line system of ship construction.

He graduated from Glasgow University in 1825 at the age of 17 and moved to Edinburgh where he taught mathematics and science at the Leith Mechanics' Institute, achieving the highest attendance in the city.

But although encouraged to stand for the permanent position he refused to compete with another candidate he admired and thereafter concentrated the engineering profession and experimental research on a large scale.

[5] The American engineer Alexander Lyman Holley befriended Scott Russell and his family on his various visits to London at the time of the construction of Great Eastern.

As a result of this, Holley, and his colleague Zerah Colburn, travelled on the maiden voyage of Great Eastern from Southampton to New York in June 1860.

Six were constructed in 1834, well-sprung and fitted out to high standard, which from March 1834 ran between Glasgow's George Square and the Tontine Hotel in Paisley at hourly intervals at 15 mph.

The discovery is described here in his own words:[9][10] I was observing the motion of a boat which was rapidly drawn along a narrow channel by a pair of horses, when the boat suddenly stopped—not so the mass of water in the channel which it had put in motion; it accumulated round the prow of the vessel in a state of violent agitation, then suddenly leaving it behind, rolled forward with great velocity, assuming the form of a large solitary elevation, a rounded, smooth and well-defined heap of water, which continued its course along the channel apparently without change of form or diminution of speed.

He built wave tanks at his home and noticed some key properties: Scott Russell's experimental work seemed at contrast with Isaac Newton's and Daniel Bernoulli's theories of hydrodynamics.

[16] A Dutch translation of Bazin's work entitled Verslag aan de Fransche academie van wetenschappen over het gedeelte der verhandeling van Bazin, betrekkelijk de opstuwingen en de voortbeweging der golven (English: Report to the French Academy of Sciences on the portion of Bazin's treatise relating to surges and the propagation of waves) was featured in the proceedings of the Dutch Koninklijk Instituut van Ingenieurs (English: Royal Institute of Engineers) in 1869.

Lord Rayleigh published a paper in Philosophical Magazine in 1876 to support John Scott Russell's experimental observation with his mathematical theory.

Although the paper by Korteweg and de Vries in 1895 was not the first theoretical treatment of this subject, it was a very important milestone in the history of the development of soliton theory.

[27] Charles Wentworth Dilke offered him the editorial position of a new weekly paper, the Railway Chronicle in London and the Russell family was soon in a small two-room flat in Westminster.

The next year he also became the secretary of the committee set up by the Royal Society of Arts to organise a national exhibition, which provided them with a town house in the Strand.

Russell became a member of the Institution of Civil Engineers in 1847 attending regularly and making frequent contributions, was elected to its council in 1857 and became a vice-president in 1862.

His obituary said of naval architecture: From around 1838, Scott Russell was employed at the small Greenock shipyard of Thomson and Spiers where he introduced his wave-line system to a series of Royal Mail ships, together with many other innovations.

[31] Before they started any business together, he was held in high regard by Isambard Kingdom Brunel who made him a partner in his project to build Great Eastern.

Scott Russell was a better scientist than a businessman and his reputation never fully recovered from his financial irregularities, gross neglect of duty and disputes.

[35][36] He afterwards complained about the secrecy that prevented an open discussion of the issues, criticizing those within the Navy who argued that iron ships could not be protected.

Scott Russell used the design of the Bodensee Trajekt as the basis of a cross-channel ferry that could manage the shallow harbour of Dover, but this was not realised until 1933.

[43] In 1838 he was awarded the gold Keith Medal by the Royal Society of Edinburgh for his paper "On the Laws by which water opposes Resistance to the Motion of Floating Bodies".