Rudolf Erich Raspe

Rudolf Erich Raspe (March 1736 – 16 November 1794) was a German librarian, writer, and scientist, called by his biographer John Patrick Carswell a "rogue".

He contributed in 1769 a zoological paper to the 59th volume of the Philosophical Transactions, which led to his being elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London, and he wrote voluminously on all sorts of subjects.

[4] In London, he employed his knowledge of English and his learning to secure a living by publishing and translating books on various subjects.

This may predate the earliest known smelting of the metal (which requires extremely high temperatures) and has led to speculation that it may have been produced during a visit by Raspe to Happy-Union mine (at nearby Pentewan) in the late eighteenth century.

[3][7] He also worked for the famous publisher John Nichols on several projects, among which was a descriptive catalogue he compiled of James Tassie's collection of pastes and casts of gems, in two quarto volumes (1791) of laborious industry and bibliographical rarity.

Raspe then went to Scotland, and in Caithness found a patron in Sir John Sinclair of Ulbster, whose mineralogical proclivities he proceeded to impose upon by pretending to discover valuable and workable veins on his estates.

In a preface to the novel, Scott himself noted that the Dousterswivel character might seem "forced and improbable", but wrote: "... the reader may be assured that this part of the narrative is founded on a fact of actual occurrence.