Robins, BENJAMIN

Robins, BENJAMIN, mathematician, the father of the military art of gunnery, was born at Bath in 1707 of a poor Quaker family. Having obtained a little instruction in mathematics, he prosecuted this branch of science with great zest, and, having removed to London, set up for a teacher of mathematics, and published several mathematical treatises which gained for him considerable reputation. Robins next commenced his great series of experiments on the resisting force of the air to projectiles, varying his labours by the study of fortification, and invented the Ballistic Pendulum (q.v.). In 1734 he demolished, in a treatise entitled A Discourse concerning the Certainty of Sir I. Newton's Method of Fluxions, the objections brought by the celebrated Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne, against Newton's principle of ultimate ratios. His great and valuable work, the New Principles of Gunnery, upon the preparation of which he had spent an enormous amount of labour, appeared in 1742, and produced a complete revolution in the art of Gunnery (q.v.). In consideration of his able defence of the policy of the then government, by means of pamphlets which he wrote and published from time to time, he received (1749) the post of 'Engineer-in-general to the East India Company;' but his first undertaking, the planning of the defences of Madras, was no sooner accomplished than he was seized with a fever, and he died July 29, 1751. His works were collected and published in 1761.