Alexander Steuart
Open-knowledge reference entry

Alexander Steuart PRSSA FRSE (1884 – 1960) was a 20th century Scottish inventor and horologist. In 1921 he patented the Steuart Clock an early accurate electric clock.
Life
He was born in Broxburn, West Lothian on 12 September 1884, the son of Daniel Rankin Steuart and his wife Margaret Osborne. He was educated at George Watson's College. He was then apprenticed as an electrical engineer at King & Co on Prince Regent Street in Leith. He then studied Electrical Engineering at Heriot-Watt College in Edinburgh. Around 1905 he went to Bolivia as a mining engineer. He then worked in the automobile industry for around a decade, working largely on instrument design, working variously in Singapore, Glasgow and Birmingham.
Around 1920 he returned to Edinburgh and set up a radio and electric clock shop at 85 Pitt Street (now called Dublin Street). From 1930 he ran Jenners Department Store's electrical department on Princes Street.
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This entry incorporates text from “Alexander Steuart” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.