Robert Stirling
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The Reverend Dr Robert Stirling (October 25, 1790 – June 6, 1878) was a Scottish clergyman, and inventor of the stirling engine.
[edit] Biography
Stirling was born at Cloag Farm near Methven, Perthshire in Scotland, the third of eight children. He inherited his father's interest in engineering[citation needed], but studied divinity and became a minister of the Church of Scotland as second charge of the Laigh Kirk of Kilmarnock in 1816. Concerned about the danger the workers in his parish faced from steam engines, which frequently exploded because of the poor quality of the iron boilerplate available at the time, he decided to improve the design of the air engine in the hope that it would provide a safer alternative. He invented what he called the Heat Economiser (now generally known as the regenerator), a device for improving the thermal efficiency of a variety of processes, obtaining a patent for the economiser and an engine incorporating it in 1816. Stirling's engine could not explode, because it worked at a lower pressure, and could not cause steam burns. In 1818 he built the first practical version of his engine, used to pump water from a quarry.
In 1819 Stirling married Jean Rankin. They had seven children, including the locomotive engineers Patrick Stirling and James Stirling (engineer).
While in Kilmarnock, he collaborated with another inventor, Thomas Morton, who provided workshop facilities for Stirling's research. Both men were interested in astronomy, and having learnt from Morton how to grind lenses, Stirling invented several optical instruments.
Robert, together with his brother James an engineer, took out several further patents for improvements to the air engine and in the 1840's James built a large air engine driving all the machinery at his Dundee Foundry Company.
In a letter of 1876, Robert Stirling acknowledged the importance of Henry Bessemer's new invention – the Bessemer process for the manufacture of steel – which made steam engines safer and threatened to make the air engine obsolete. However, he also expressed a hope that the new steel would improve the performance of air engines [1].
Stirling died in Galston, East Ayrshire. The theoretical basis of Stirling's engine, the Stirling cycle, would not be fully understood until the work of Sadi Carnot (1796 – 1832). Carnot produced (and published in 1825) a general theory of heat engines, the Carnot cycle, of which the Stirling cycle is a similar case.
