Dugald Clerk

Sir Dugald Clerk was a Scottish engineer who designed the first successful two-stroke engine in 1878 and patented it in England in 1881. He was born in Glasgow on 31 March 1854, the son of the machinist Donald Clerk and his wife Martha Symington, was privately tutored and then apprenticed to a Glasgow firm, and from 1871 to 1876 studied engineering at Anderson College in Glasgow and then at the Yorkshire College of Science in Leeds. He began work on his own engine designs in October 1878 after modifying a Brayton engine with a spark plug, at a time when the commercial engines available were the non-compression Lenoir engine and the slightly improved Hugon engine, both quite inefficient. He formed the intellectual property firm Marks and Clerk with George Croydon Marks, was knighted on 24 August 1917, and during the First World War was Director of Engineering Research for the Admiralty. He married Margaret Hanney in 1883 and died in Ewhurst, Surrey, on 12 November 1932.