John Perry

Who is John Perry?

John Perry was a pioneering engineer and mathematician from Ireland. He was born on 14 February 1850 at Garvagh, County Londonderry, the second son of Samuel Perry and a Scottish-born wife.

Perry worked as Lord Kelvin's assistant at the University of Glasgow, and later became professor of mechanical engineering at Finsbury Technical College. He was a colleague of William Edward Ayrton and John Milne at the Imperial College of Engineering in Tokyo, 1875–79, and was also a Fellow of the Royal Society. In 1900 he was elected president of the Institution of Electrical Engineers, and from 1906–08 served as president of the Physical Society of London.

Perry was a great admirer of his employer, Lord Kelvin. In the printing of his 1890 lecture on spinning tops, Perry inscribed the following acknowledgement: "This report of an experimental lecture is inscribed to Sir William Thomson, by his affectionate pupil, the lecturer, who hereby takes a convenient method of acknowledging the real author of whatever is worth publication in the following pages." The book was later reprinted by Dover Publications in 1957 as Spinning Tops and Gyroscopic Motions.

Perry received an honorary doctorate from the University of Glasgow in June 1901.