Richard Hugh Stotherd
Biritish military engineer
Richard Hugh Stotherd (1828–1895) was a British Army officer, a major-general in the Royal Engineers and the director-general of the Ordnance Survey of the United Kingdom,
Life
The son of General Richard J. Stotherd (1796–1879), colonel commandant Royal Engineers, by his first wife, Elizabeth Sydney (died 1853), daughter of Hugh Boyle, of Dungiven, County Londonderry, he was born at Angler Castle, County Tyrone, on 25 November 1828. His father, who came of a Lincolnshire family, worked on the Ordnance Survey of Ireland, and was promoted general 19 June 1872.
Educated at University College school, and at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, Stotherd received a commission as second lieutenant in the Royal Engineers on 2 May 1847, and first lieutenant on 28 October. He went through the usual course of professional study at Chatham, and then served at Woolwich and at Gibraltar. On his return home he was posted to the Ordnance Survey of Great Britain and sent to Dumfries. He was promoted to be second captain on 21 May 1855, and first captain on 17 May 1860.
Leaving the Ordnance Survey in 1861, Stotherd went to Weymouth, and then, at time of the Trent affair, to North America, where he acted as brigade major and assistant to the commanding Royal Engineer, serving four years in Canada and New Brunswick.
On Stotherd's return to England on 13 February 1866 he was appointed instructor in electricity, chemistry, and photography at the school of military engineering at Chatham. There he was an early investigator of the application of electricity to mining and naval mines, and he also organised the first field telegraph. He was sent to the 1867 Paris Exhibition to report on military telegraphs.
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