The banker Patrick Miller of Dalswinton, just north of Dumfries, was a shareholder in the Carron Company engineering works and an enthusiastic experimenter in ordnance and naval architecture, including double or triple hulled pleasure boats propelled by cranked paddlewheels placed between the hulls.
On seeing a steam-carriage model made by the engineer William Symington (or on the suggestion of Symington's friend James Taylor), he got Symington to build his patent steam engine with its drive into a twin hulled pleasure boat. This was successfully tried out on Dalswinton Loch near Miller's house on the 14th October, 1788. The next year a larger engine was fitted to a 60 ft (18 m) long twin hull paddle boat and tried on the Forth and Clyde Canal. After initial problems of paddle wheels breaking up on 2nd December, on 26th and 27th December 1789 the vessel travelled some distance along the canal at a "motion of nearly seven miles an hour". Miller had been complaining about the cost of the venture, and he then abandoned the project. Ten years later Lord Dundas restarted Symington's work on a steamboat, leading to the famous paddle steamerCharlotte Dundas.
External links
William Symington (http://www.gsk58.dial.pipex.com/symington/index.shtml)
William Symington, inventor of steam navigation (http://www.crawford-john.org.uk/symintn.htm)
Son of Wiliam Miller of Glenlee and brother of Sir Thomas Miller, President of the Court of Session.
Burns himself became a victim of Miller's habit of under estimating the time ideas take to be turned into realities: for although Ellisland was a farm that ultimately became a profitable one, it did not recover from its exhaustion until several years after Burns had left it.
The arrangement between Miller and Burns was that Miller gave the poet £300 with which to build a farmhouse and fence the fields.
It was introduced to Scotland in the late eighteenth century by PatrickMiller of Dalswinton.
He was a wealthy man, a director of the Bank of Scotland and Chairman of the Carron Iron Company, and had a passionate interest in mechanical and agricultural improvement.
King Gustav III of Sweden was a satisfied customer of Carron, and he presented Miller with a gold, diamond-encrusted snuff-box bearing a miniature of himself, containing rutabaga seeds.
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