Portal:Scotland/Selected article/Week 46, 2011

Robert_Stevenson FRSE MInstCE FSAS MWS FGS FRAS FSA (Scot) (8 June 1772 – 12 July 1850) was a Scottish civil engineer and famed designer and builder of lighthouses. One of his finest achievements was the construction of the Bell Rock Lighthouse. Stevenson was born in Glasgow; his father was Alan Stevenson, a partner in a West India trading house in the city. He died of an epidemic fever on the island of St. Christopher when Stevenson was an infant; at much the same time, Stevenson's uncle died of the same disease, leaving Alan's widow, Jane Lillie, in straitened financial circumstances. As a result, Stevenson was educated as an infant at a charity school.

His mother intended Robert for the ministry and to this end sent him to the school of a famous linguist of the day, Mr. Macintyre. However, in Stevenson's fifteenth year, Jane Lillie married Thomas Smith a tinsmith, lampmaker and ingenious mechanic who had in 1786 been appointed engineer to the newly formed Northern Lighthouse Board. Stevenson served as Smith's assistant, and was sufficiently successful that at age 19 he was entrusted with the supervision of the erection of a lighthouse on the island of Little Cumbrae in the River Clyde. He devoted himself with determination to follow the profession of a civil engineer, and applied himself to the practice of surveying and architectural drawing and attended lectures in mathematics and physical sciences at the Andersonian Institute at Glasgow.