Millington, John

SUBJECT AREA: Mechanical, pneumatic and hydraulic engineering

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b. 1779

d. 1868

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English engineer and educator.

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John Millington was Professor of Mechanics at the Royal Institution, London, from 1817 to 1829. He gave numerous courses on natural philosophy and mechanics and supported the introduction of coal gas for lighting. In 1823 he testified to a Select Committee of the House of Commons that the spread of gas lighting would greatly benefit the preservation of law and order, and with the same utilitarian and penal inclination he devised a treadmill for use in the Bedfordshire House of Correction. Millington was appointed the first Professor of Engineering and the Application of Mechanical Philosophy to the Arts at the newly founded University of London in 1828, but he speedily resigned from the post, preferring to go to Mexico in 1829. Like Trevithick and Robert Stephenson before him, he was attracted to the New World by the possibility of using new techniques to reopen old mines, and he became an engineer to some Mexican mining projects. In 1837 he went to Williamsburg in the United States, being appointed Professor of Chemistry, and it was there that he died in 1868. Millington wrote extensively on scientific subjects.

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Further Reading

Dictionary of National Biography.

M.Berman, The Royal Institution, pp. 46, 98–9.

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