Lewis Dunbar Brodie Gordon (1815–1876) was a Scottish civil engineer.
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".[1]
Gordon became a mentor to the brothers James Thomson and William Thomson, encouraging their interest in the development of a general theory of heat. In 1848 he gave the brothers a copy of French physicist Sadi Carnot’s 1824 treatise On the Motive Power of Fire, with which he used to write his first thermodynamics article the 1848 “On an Absolute Thermometric Scale Founded on Carnot’s Theory of the Motive Power of Heat”, which founded the absolute temperature scale.