Mårten Triewald

Mårten Triewald (1691 to 1747), sometimes called the Younger, was a Swedish merchant, engineer and amateur physicist and a Fellow of the Royal Society. The son of Mårten Triewald the Elder, a farrier and anchorsmith of German origin, he went to London on business and attended John Theophilus Desaguliers' lectures in Newtonian experimental philosophy. In 1716 he worked as an inspector at a Newcastle coal mine, where he studied mechanics and the steam engines in use and improved them. Back in Sweden in 1726 he built a steam engine at the Dannemora mine, believed to be the first in Sweden put to practical industrial use. In 1728 and 1729 he lectured on mechanics at the House of Nobility, and in 1732 Lund University took over his instrument collection. He formed a diving company in 1729 and wrote on diving bells, and he also wrote on bee-keeping. He became captain of mechanics at the Fortification Administration in 1735, was elected to the Royal Society of Sciences in Uppsala in 1729 and to the Royal Society in 1731, and in 1739 was one of the six founders of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.