Nicholas Procter Burgh
British marine engineer
Nicholas Procter Burgh (1834–1900) was a British marine engineer, known for his work on marine engines, marine engineering, screw propulsion, boilers and boiler-making, and the indicator diagram.
Live and work
Born in Callington, Cornwall in 1834, Burgh married Elizabeth Parker Lewis from Gloucester in 1857 in Plymouth. They settled in Sheerness, where in 1859 Burgh obtained his first patent for an improvement of steam-engines. They further lived in Waterloo Road, London in the 1870s and in Croydon, a large town in South London, in the 1880s.
After working in industry for some years, Burgh started a practice as consulting marine engineer in 1859. He became a member of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers in 1870, and was elected the first president of the Institution of Marine Engineers. One of his apprentices was the mechanical engineer, inventor and general manager George Best Martin (1847–1901), and another pupil was William Wallington Harris (1841–1924).
Burgh published his first article in the London-based monthly magazine The Engineer in 1859 about his patented design for an improved steam engine. In the 1860s he further came into prominence, when he gave several lectures at the Royal Society of Arts in London and started publishing several books. More of those books were revised, enlarged and republished in the next decades.
“Nicholas Procter Burgh” enters the record as british marine engineer. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Nicholas, Procter and Burgh can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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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 May 24, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q20711891. VIAF identifies the subject as 4395149296157780670002. The Library of Congress control number is nb2018020284. 1 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1834, 1900, 1857 and 1859.
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This entry incorporates text from “Nicholas Procter Burgh” 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.