Lewis Gordon (civil engineer)

A student and assistant to Marc Brunel, during the construction of the Thames Tunnel, he made a career change to mining.

Impressed by what he saw, he wrote to his friend Robert Stirling Newall, urging him to "Invent a machine for making (wire ropes)".

Newall and Company commenced making wire ropes for "Mining, Railway, Ships' Rigging, and other purposes".

In 1848 he gave the brothers a copy of French physicist Sadi Carnot's 1824 treatise On the Motive Power of Fire, with which he used to write his first thermodynamics article the 1848 "On an Absolute Thermometric Scale Founded on Carnot’s Theory of the Motive Power of Heat", which founded the absolute temperature scale.

[1] He died on 28 April 1876 at Poynter's Grove[1] in Totteridge in Hertfordshire and is buried in the family plot in Greyfriars Kirkyard in central Edinburgh.

Lewis Gordon's childhood home at 27 London Street, Edinburgh
Poynter's Grove, Totteridge, in the early 1900s.
The grave of Lewis Dunbar Brodie Gordon in Greyfriars Kirkyard, Edinburgh