Robert Stirling Newall
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Robert Stirling Newall (1812 - 1889) was a Scottish engineer and astronomer.
Born in Dundee, he patented a new type of wire rope in 1840 and established a factory in Gateshead for its manufacture in partnership with Messrs. Liddell and Gordon. He was instrumental in developing substantial improvements to submarine telegraph cables, devising a method involving the use of gutta percha surrounded by strong wires.
The first successful Dover-Calais cable, laid in 1851, was manufactured in Newall's works, and approximately half of the Atlantic cable was also manufactured at his works. In 1853 he also invented the brake-drum and cone for laying cables in deep Waters.
Newall was a keen astronomer, and he commissioned Thomas Cooke to build a telescope for his private observatory at Ferndene, his Gateshead residence. For many years, the 25 inch refracting telescope was the largest in the world, and it was gifted to the University Observatory in Cambridge after his death in 1889. By the end of the 1950s, the telescope had fallen into disuse, and in 1958 it was donated to the Penteli Observatory, at the time just north of the city of Athens.
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