Plaque to John Scott Russell
Introduction
The photograph on this page of Plaque to John Scott Russell by Jim Barton as part of the Geograph project.
The Geograph project started in 2005 with the aim of publishing, organising and preserving representative images for every square kilometre of Great Britain, Ireland and the Isle of Man.
There are currently over 7.5m images from over 14,400 individuals and you can help contribute to the project by visiting https://www.geograph.org.uk
Plaque to John Scott Russell
Image: © Jim Barton Taken: 25 Sep 2013
A plaque on the west side of bridge 11 commemorating Russell's observation on this canal of a water wave set off by a horse-drawn boat that stopped suddenly. The wave carried on without appreciable loss and Russell followed it on horseback '... for a chase of one or two miles ...' Russell, a naval engineer, recognised it as an unusual phenomenon and reported it to the British Association. The introduction to his 1845 paper can be seen at http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.fl.12.010180.000303?journalCode=fluid. Nowadays, solitary waves or 'solitons' are of great interest in fibre optics, where their equivalent in light form can propagate great distances in fibre with much less degradation than more conventional light pulses. See also the Scott Russell aqueduct Image that carries the canal over the Edinburgh City By-Pass.
Images are licensed for reuse under creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0
Image Location
Latitude
55.919313
Longitude
-3.321628