BEAUFOY

UNITED KINGDOM (see also List of Individuals)

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4.3.1764 Lambeth/UK - 4.5.1827 Bushey/UK

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Mark Beaufoy was taught by an astronomer. He crossed the Channel with his wife to live in Neuchâtel, Switzerland; he continued in 1787 for Grenoble in France, where he climbed Mont Blanc as the first Englishman. On return to England, Beaufoy lived in London. He was elected to the Royal Society in 1790.

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Beaufoy made his first experiments on the resistance of solids moving through water before he was fifteen. He checked a cone who was said to offer less resistance when drawn base first and discovered the fallacy of this statement. He was in 1791 a founding member of the Society for the Improvement of Naval Architecture, set up in recognition of the British inferiority to France in shipbuilding. One of its first acts was to offer 100 £ to anyone ascertaining the laws of resistance of water, a challenge accepted by Beaufoy. He was allowed free use of the Greenland Dock in 1793 and in the next five years timed the speed of towed wooden models of different shapes. He was a patient observer and collector of data, rather than an original theoretician. Nevertheless, he was the first Englishman to investigate the theory of metacentric stability forwarded by the French naval engineer Bouguer. A report was presented in 1800 along with the analysis of 1,671 test runs. Beaufoy's work was known and consulted by the steamship pioneer Samuel Fulton, but wider recognition followed only when Beaufoy's son Henry published the experiments in 1834 at a time when steam propulsion was becoming practicable. Eventually Beaufoy's name became established as a person who had demonstrated the friction component of a ship's resistance. He was also involved in the second part of his life with the observation of the earth's magnetic field and received for this research a medal from the Astronomical Society.

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_{Barrington, D., Daines, Y., Beaufoy, M. (1818). The possibility of approaching the North Pole asserted. Allman: London.}

_{Beaufoy, M. (1834). Nautical and hydraulic experiments with numerous scientific miscellanies.}

_{H. Beaufoy: London.}

_{McConnell, A. (2004). Beaufoy, Mark. Oxford dictionary of National biography 4: 646-647.}

_{University Press: Oxford. http://www.pbagalleries.com/search/item.php http://209.85.129.104/search?q=cache:figTPuEHrEEJ:www.pbagalleries.com/search/item.php %3Fanr%3D168341%26PHPSESSID%3Da4c652c7775c872ac59bd5c86673b56a%26PHP SESSID%3Da4c652c7775c872ac59bd5c86673b56a+mark+beaufoy+1764-1827&hl=de& ct=clnk&cd=22&gl=ch P}