Lewis Gordon (civil engineer)

Prof Lewis Dunbar Brodie Gordon FRSE (1815–1876) was a Scottish civil engineer.

He was the fourth son of Joseph Gordon WS, an Edinburgh lawyer, and his wife Anne Clunes (d.1881). They lived at 27 London Street in Edinburgh's Second New Town. He was educated at the High School in Edinburgh then went to Edinburgh University.

A student and assistant to Isambard Kingdom Brunel, during the construction of the Thames Tunnel, he made a career change to mining. Registering as a student at the Freiburg School of Mines, Germany, he then studied further at the École Polytechnique in Paris.

In 1838 he visited the mines at Clausthal, and met Wilhelm Albert. Impressed by what he saw, he wrote to his friend Robert Stirling Newall, urging him to "Invent a machine for making (wire ropes)". On receipt of Gordon's letter, Newall designed a wire rope machine. On Gordon's return to the UK in 1839, he formed a partnership with Newall and Charles Liddell, registering R.S. Newall and Company in Dundee. On 17 August 1840, Newall took out a patent for "certain improvements in wire rope and the machinery for making such rope," and R.S. Newall and Company commenced making wire ropes for "Mining, Railway, Ships' Rigging, and other purposes".

He was Professor of Civil Engineering at Glasgow University from 1840 to 1855. In 1845 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh his proposer being James David Forbes.

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