by W. Johnson
© Oxford University Press 2004 All rights reserved
Glenie, James (bap. 1750, d. 1817), soldier and mathematician, baptized on 7 October 1750 at Leslie, Fife, was the son of John Glenie, army officer, and his wife, Margaret Smith. He went from a parochial school to the University of St Andrews where he made good progress in classics and divinity, being intended for the church, but soon showed a talent for science and mathematics. He joined the army, and on the outbreak of the American War of Independence in 1775 he embarked with his regiment for North America, becoming second lieutenant in the artillery in November 1776. He was transferred to become practitioner engineer and was commissioned second lieutenant in the engineers in February 1779.
In 1774, while in the army, it seems that Glenie discovered the 'antecedental calculus', and wrote 'a small performance' of it in Latin which was printed in July 1776. He sent a paper on this to the Royal Society, which was read in 1777 and published the following year. At much the same time Glenie wrote papers entitled 'The division of right lines, surfaces and solids' and 'The general mathematical laws which regulate and extend proportion universally', printed in the society's Philosophical Transactions in 1776 and 1777. These publications, with his book, The History of Gunnery with a New Method of Deriving the Theory of Projectiles (1776), secured Glenie's election to the Royal Society on 18 March 1779, while he was still in Quebec. He returned to England in 1780 and married Mary Anne Locke, daughter of the military storekeeper at Plymouth, with whom he had three children.
When in 1783 Sir Joseph Banks, newly installed president of the Royal Society, sought to oust the mathematician-engineer Charles Hutton from his post as foreign secretary to the society, Glenie was one of those fellows who opposed the move; his vigorous speech, made at a meeting in February 1784 in defence of the mathematical fellows, was published in the account of this confrontation.
The duke of Richmond, appointed master-general of the ordnance in 1783, consulted Glenie about his plans to fortify all naval arsenals and to create lines of defence along the British coast. Glenie's somewhat tactless declaration that these plans were absurd and impracticable was ill received and led to a flurry of pamphleteering on both sides. (Even though the duke's proposals were rejected by parliament in 1786 Glenie later published Observations on the Duke of Richmond's Plans, 1805, which was followed by his own ideas, as Observations on the Defence of Great Britain, 1807.) Glenie had been promoted first lieutenant in 1787 but, having incurred the duke's displeasure, resigned his commission and emigrated with his family to New Brunswick, Canada, where he purchased a tract of land and was elected a representative of the house of assembly. He set up as a contractor for ships' timber and masts, but his speculation failed and Glenie and his partner were financially ruined. He was eventually also a political failure and he returned to England in 1805 (see F. G. Stanley in Collections, 42, 1942, 145-73) .
In 1794 Glenie published a new booklet on the antecedental calculus. Newton's approach to the calculus had used the notion of limit unclearly, and also drew upon velocity; Glenie wished to avoid all this, so as an alternative he defined the derivative of a function algebraically by using the binomial theorem in order to express the ratio of the increments of two functions as a power series in the incremental variable h, and then blithely deleting terms containing powers of h above the first. A related work was a letter from Glenie to Francis Maseres, containing 'A demonstration of Sir Isaac Newton's binomial theorem'. This, and other papers by Glenie, were published by Maseres in his Scriptores logarithmici (6 vols., 1791-1807).
Glenie was elected fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh on 27 January 1794, and several of his papers were published in Edinburgh. Glenie now had no employment but the earl of Chatham paid him a retainer as 'engineer-extraordinary', and later found him an appointment as instructor in artillery to the East India Company, with a reasonable income of £400 per annum. The earl also secured his appointment in 1797 as inspecting engineer to some of the West Indian islands. This good fortune was, however, of short duration. He was summoned to testify for the crown at the prosecution of G. L. Wardle MP, but his evidence provoked severe censure from chief justice Lord Ellenborough, and led to his dismissal from his existing posts.
In 1812 Glenie went to Copenhagen to negotiate the purchase of a large plantation in Denmark for a member of parliament, but no agreement had been made before hand and on return his claim for compensation was disputed. It was referred to arbitration, but the arbitrators themselves could not agree and so Glenie was once more left destitute. His attempts to recruit some mathematical pupils failed. He died of apoplexy in Chelsea on 23 November 1817; he was buried at St Martin-in-the-Fields, Westminster, and later reburied in an unknown place.
W. JOHNSON
Sources
Chambers, Scots. (1856)
GM, 1st ser., 87/2 (1817), 571-2
Army List (1770-87)
D. R. Fisher, 'Wardle, Gwyllym Lloyd', HoP, Commons
J. M. Anderson, ed., The matriculation roll of the University of St Andrews, 1747-1897 (1905), 17
N. Guicciardini, The development of Newtonian calculus in Britain, 1700-1800 (1989)
W. Johnson, 'An introduction to the works of James Glenie', International Journal of Impact Engineering, 19 (1997), 515-29
W. Johnson, 'James Glenie in Canada and "America" and new aspects of his life and work', International Journal of Impact Engineering, 21 (1998), 203-24
bap. reg. Scot.
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