Edward Berthon
British inventor (1813-1899)
Edward Lyon Berthon FRAS (20 February 1813 London – 27 October 1899) was an English inventor and clergyman.
Life
He was born in Finsbury Square, London, on 20 February 1813, was the tenth child of Peter Berthon, and his wife, Elizabeth Green Park, daughter of Henry Park of Liverpool, who were married in 1797.
His father was great-grandson of St. Pol le Berthon, the only son of the Huguenot Marquis de Chatellerault, who escaped the persecutions that followed the revocation of the edict of Nantes in 1685.
He found a refuge in Lisbon, whence his son proceeded to London.
Peter Berthon was an army contractor, who was reduced from wealth to comparative poverty by the wreck of a number of his ships and the end of the war on the downfall of Napoleon.
Berthon was at school in Wanstead and then at the Monoux School Walthamstow (of which he left a memoir). From there, he studied medicine in Liverpool and Dublin, but after his marriage in 1834 he gave up his intention of becoming a doctor, and travelled for about six years on the continent. Keenly interested from boyhood in mechanical science, he made experiments in the application of the screw propeller for boats. But his model, with a two-bladed propeller, was only ridiculed when it was placed before the British admiralty.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Edward Berthon” as british inventor (1813-1899). Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5344241. VIAF identifies the subject as 7358152502819910800009. The Library of Congress control number is nb2018007847. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1813, 1899, 1797 and 1685.
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This entry incorporates text from “Edward Berthon” 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.