An early Scottish pamphlet on hydraulics and pneumatics: William Welwood's De aqua in altum per fistulas plumbeas facile exprimenda apologia demonstrativa (1582)

Abstract

William Welwood (c.1552–1624) taught at St Andrews, Scotland's oldest university, where he was its first professor of mathematics, and later professor of law. As well as better-known legal works, he published a short pamphlet on hydraulics and pneumatics here discussed. After an outline of the fractious personal, religious, and political environment in which Welwood lived and worked, the content of his pamphlet is described. Its place is then examined within wider scientific and technological contexts.

Acknowledgements

The author is most grateful to Elizabeth Craik, John Forrester and Robert Smart for assistance with translation and for other helpful information; also to Special Collections, University of Edinburgh Main Library for permission to reproduce the title page of Welwood's pamphlet.

Notes

¹ Fuller biographical details are in Baxter (1959), Furdell (1998), and Cairns (1998, 2004–16).

² Information kindly supplied by Robert N Smart from the Graduation Roll and from Smart (2012). See also Reid (2011, Appendix).

³ Welwood and Arthur were the first to be designated professors in particular subjects. The designation ‘professor’ was little used before then, although the posts of ‘master’ (including the provost or principal as ‘first master’), were reserved for scholars in particular areas.

⁴ Several documents relating to these matters are held by the University of St Andrews Special Collections: useful brief summaries in English are given in the on-line St Andrews Archive Catalogue: search under ‘Welwood’ and ‘Blair’. Other manuscript material, noted in Cairns (1998), is in the Balcarres Papers.

⁵ There is a further related legal manuscript in University of St Andrews Special Collections (Welwood nd).

⁶ Kirkness is situated just east of Loch Leven in Fife, then about a day's journey from St Andrews (but now about forty minutes by car). Kirkness House, a complex of farm buildings, is now a picturesque ruin, much of it built after this time. It was owned by the Douglas family in the late sixteenth century: Sir George Douglas of Kirkness died in 1609. In 1684, ownership passed to Sir William Bruce of Kinross (http://douglashistory.co.uk/history/Places/kirkness_fife.htm; accessed 7 November 2016). The nearby Kirkness colliery was further developed in the nineteenth century, and from 1956 became the site of the Westfield opencast mine, for a time the largest in the UK (http://www.scotlandsplaces.gov.uk/record/rcahms/81626/westfield-opencast-coal-mine/; accessed 7 November 2016).

⁷ Around 1700, a Henry Wellwood of Garvock (now with double ‘ll’), purchased the coal-bearing Baldridge estate, near Dunfermline and worked it successfully. This became known as the ‘Wellwood Colliery’ and continued production, under later owners, well into the twentieth century (Martin and Sparling 2016). The small village of Wellwood, just north of Dunfermline, is named after this family.

⁸ Francis, Earl of Bothwell, is not to be confused with the previous Earl Bothwell, James Hepburn, adventurer and last husband of Mary Queen of Scots, who died in 1578.

⁹ The assistance of Elizabeth Craik and John Forrester with this translation from Latin is gratefully acknowledged.

¹⁰ The Latin libramentum is usually translated as ‘weight’ or ‘counterpoise’ associated with librae ‘scales’. Roughly speaking, for a siphon to work, there must be an imbalance to drive the flow: but see the discussion below.

¹¹ sine nova fusione could mean without recasting the lead or without resoldering the joints.

¹² Vitruvius uses the same word, geniculum, for ‘bend’, from genu, ‘knee’.

¹³ That is, the intermingling of separate substances.

¹⁴ The most impressive ancient ‘inverse siphon’ supplied water across a 190-metre-deep valley to the Greco-Roman city of Pergamon. The pipes would have had to withstand a raised pressure of about 19 atmospheres: see for example, Schram 2012.

¹⁵ Although there is a copy in St Andrews University Library Special Collections, it was acquired in more recent times.

¹⁶ It is only the component of gravity acting along the sloping pipe that provides the weight: that is, g sin θ, where is gravitational acceleration and is the local angle of inclination to the horizontal.