Samuel Bentham

Sir Samuel Bentham (11 January 1757 - 31 May 1831) was a noted mechanical engineer credited with numerous innovations, particularly related to naval architecture, including weapons. He was also the brother of philosopher Jeremy Bentham.

At the age of 14, Bentham was apprenticed to a shipwright at Woolwich Dockyard, serving there for seven years. In 1780 he moved to Russia, where he was employed in the service of Prince Potemkin, who had an establishment designed to promote the introduction of various arts of civilization. Though he was initially hired as a shipbuilder, Bentham soon became responsible for multiple tasks, and eventually came to have complete responsibility over the administration of Potemkin's estate. He was in charge of a battalion of a thousand men, and the complexities involved in dealing with such a workforce led Bentham to conceive the idea of central inspection, out of which emerged the panopticon project popularized by his brother Jeremy.

In 1795, Bentham was appointed by the Admiralty to be its first (and only) Inspector-General of Naval Works. He was tasked with continuing the modernisation of Portsmouth Dockyard, and in particular the introduction of steam power and mechanisation of production processes in the dockyard.

Bentham is credited with helping to revolutionise the production of the wooden pulley blocks used in ship's rigging, devising woodworking machinery to improve production efficiency. His efforts were augmented by those of Marc Isambard Brunel and Henry Maudslay, marking the arrival of mass production techniques in British manufacturing at the Portsmouth Block Mills.

His son George Bentham, born in 1800, became a noted botanist.

References

Catherine Pease-Watkin, 'Jeremy and Samuel Bentham ? The Private and the Public (http://www.ucl.ac.uk/Bentham-Project/journal/cpwsam.htm),' Journal of Bentham Studies 5, 2002.