- He was said to be a magician who travelled with a black
spider in a small box and a black cockerel as his animal familiar.
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- But "Marvellous Merchiston" - real name John
Napier - was actually one of Scotland's greatest scientists, and a man
who has been compared to Archimedes.
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- The philosopher and mathematician, who lived from 1550
to 1617, is credited with inventing the logarithm - although Islamic scholars
may have actually beaten him by at least three centuries - the decimal
point, and a mechanical calculator. He also developed a screw and axle
to drain mines and suggested using salt as a fertiliser.
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- A number of "secret inventions" were described
by his contemporaries, including a round chariot that was an early version
of a tank, giant mirrors which could burn the sails of enemy ships, a submarine
and an artillery piece that could apparently destroy a whole field of soldiers.
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- Napier was born in Merchiston Tower in 1550, the son
of the seventh laird of Merchiston who was just 16 at the time. At the
age of 13, Napier went to study at St Salvator's College in St Andrews.
He dropped out without graduating and went off to travel in Europe at the
age of 16. There is a suggestion that he continued his studies in Paris
and Holland during the turmoil caused by the dethronement of Mary Queen
of Scots. His first wife Elizabeth died after a year and he remarried in
1572 to Agnes Chisholm. They had five sons and five daughters to add to
one son from his first marriage.
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- Napier's work on logarithms is seen as essential in creating
the ground work for Isaac Newton's extraordinary breakthroughs and other
scientific discoveries in the fields of physics and astronomy in particular.
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- A paper he wrote on multiplication, called the Rabdologiae,
contained a design for a machine using metal plates to multiply and divide
large numbers.
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- This is the earliest known mechanical device that could
be used to calculate the square root of large numbers and makes Napier
the inventor of what would centuries later become a modern calculator.
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- His "secret inventions" are more obscure as
most of his papers were lost at sea.
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- But Sir Thomas Urquhart, who has been described as "eccentric",
told of a demonstration of the devastating artillery he devised against
the threat of invasion by Spain.
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- "He gave proof upon a large plaine in Scotland to
the destruction of a great many herds of cattel and flocks of sheep, whereof
some were distant from other half a mile on all sides and some a whole
mile," Sir Thomas wrote.
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- Napier wrote extensively about religion. He predicted
the Apocalypse would take place between 1688 and 1700, and in a paper on
the Book of Revelation he wrote that its symbols could be explained by
mathematics.
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- Much of his writing is vehemently anti-Catholic even
by the standards of the time.
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- However he had several close friendships with Catholics
and even dedicated the Rabdologiae, which was published in the year of
his death, to Alexander Seton, the Earl of Dunfermline, who was secretly
Catholic.
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- One his most vitriolic anti-Catholic papers was published
shortly after his second wifeís father was implicated in the "Spanish
Blanks" plot to help a Spanish invasion and may have been a necessary
expedient to put some distance between himself and the plotters.
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- Napier is also thought to have secretly dabbled in alchemy,
divination and the occult, all highly dangerous activities at a time when
witches could be burned at the stake. He died in 1617 and is buried in
St Cuthbert's Churchyard in Edinburgh.
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- Today Merchiston Tower, where John Napier was born, lies
at the centre of the campus of Napier University in Edinburgh, which was
named after him when it was founded as a college in 1964.
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- ©2005 Scotsman.com
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- http://news.scotsman.com/scitech.cfm?id=523542005
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