James Scorgie
Professor James Scorgie (1835-1895)
Professor of Applied Mechanics, Civil Engineering College, Poona, India: (or care of Messrs. W. Watson and Co., 27 Leadenhall Street, London, E.C.).
1895 Obituary [1]
Professor JAMES SCORGIE was born at Aberdeen on 16th March 1835.
After receiving an elementary education in one of the parish schools in that city, he was apprenticed in 1850 to a firm of brass-founders there. During his term of seven years he improved his education by private study and by attending evening classes, which were then being started in Aberdeen in connection with the Science and Art Department.
In 1855 he gained the first prize for chemistry at the government examination of the Aberdeen School of Science; it consisted of a medal, and a student's prize given by the Board of Trade, the latter entitling him to attend certain classes at the Marischal College.
On leaving college he went early in 1858 to London, and later in the year to Bombay, where he obtained a situation in the locomotive department of the Great Indian Peninsula Railway, and remained there for sixteen months.
Thence he went to the locomotive department of the Bombay, Baroda, and Central India Railway, at Amrolee, near Surat, and remained there until November 1861, when he was appointed engineer's assistant on the railway bridge at Bassein, which at the time of its erection was the largest bridge in the world, being 4,312 feet long in sixty-six spans of 60 feet.
In 1862 he was appointed teacher in the Free General Assembly's Missionary Institution at Bombay; and in 1865 became acting principal of the Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy Institution at Bombay.
In 1866 he was appointed head master of the Akola High School at Berar, and remained there six years.
At the request of the Maharajah he was transferred by the government in 1872 to the Jeypore Durbar, where he re-organized the school of Industrial Arts.
In 1875 he was appointed professor of mechanism and applied science in the Civil Engineering College at Poona, where he remained fifteen years.
In 1868 he was elected a Fellow of Bombay University, for which he was an examiner.
He retired from the Indian educational service in November 1890, and returned to Aberdeen, where in 1894 he was elected a member of the school board.
His death took place there after a short illness on 15th July 1895, at the age of sixty.
He became a Member of this Institution in 1885.