Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 15.djvu/224

 into extensive use, as the construction was expensive. He was much engaged with Sir William Congreve in 1820 in contriving a method of printing stamps in two colours with compound plates for the prevention of forgery, and with the aid of John Wilks, who was then his partner, he produced the beautiful machines used at the excise and stamp offices and by the East India Company at Calcutta. In 1812 he devised the method of preserving meat and vegetables in air-tight cases, when he established a considerable manufactory for this purpose in Bermondsey. In long sea voyages meat prepared in this way became a necessary part of the ship's stores. He was an early member of the Society of Arts, of which he was one of the vice-presidents and chairman of the committee of mechanics. He received two gold medals from the society, one for his invention of an instrument to measure the velocity of rotation of machinery, the other for his counting engine. Among numerous ingenious contrivances brought out by him must be mentioned his dividing and screw-cutting engine. During the last forty years of his life he was much engaged as a civil engineer, and was one of the originators (in 1818) and a vice-president of the Institution of Civil Engineers, from which he retired in 1848. On 18 Jan. 1838 he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society, and repeatedly served on the council. He was also a member of the Royal Astronomical Society, and was held in such esteem by that body that they placed him in the chair on the occasion of receiving their charter in 1831. He had moreover a small observatory in his garden, where he spent much of his leisure time, and it was to his own transit-instrument that he first applied his novel and beautiful level. He died at 6 The Paragon, New Kent Road, London, 27 Feb. 1855. His wife Mary died 27 Aug. 1858, aged 87. His son, John Donkin, born at Dartford, Kent, 20 May 1802, was a partner with his father and John Wilks, and took part in many of their inventions. He became a member of the Institution of Civil Engineers 1824, and was also a fellow of the Geological Society (Min. of Proc. of Instit. of Civil Engineers, 1855, xiv. 130). He died at Roseacre, near Maidstone, 20 April 1854.

[Proceedings of Royal Society, 1856, vii. 586–9; Border Magazine, October 1863, 243–244; W. Walker's Distinguished Men of Science (1862 ed.), 75–7, with portrait No. 40; copies of reports and letters on Donkin, Hall, and Gamble's preserved provisions, 1817; Mansell's Chronology of Paper and Papermaking (1876), 59, 61, 79, 82, 121; Woodcroft's Alphabetical Index of Inventions (1854), pp. 167–8.] 

DONKIN, RUFANE SHAW (1773–1841), general, colonel 11th foot, surveyor-general of the ordnance, belonged to a respectable Northumbrian family, said to be of Scottish descent, and originally named Duncan. His father, General Robert Donkin, who died in March 1821, at the age of ninety-four, had been a brother-officer of Wolfe on the staff of General Fowke in Flanders, and afterwards served on the staff of General Rufane in Martinique, of Lord Granard when commander-in-chief in Ireland, and of General Gage in America. He is stated to have been a personal friend of David Hume, the historian, and to have written, at the suggestion of the latter, an account of the famous siege of Belle Isle, at which he was present. He was author of ‘Military Recollections and Remarks’ (New York, 1777). He married in 1772 Mary, daughter of the Rev. Emanuel Collins [q. v.], and by her had a son and two daughters. Rufane Shaw Donkin, the eldest child, was born in 1773, and on 21 March 1778 appointed to an ensigncy in the 44th foot at New York, in which his father then held the rank of major. He became lieutenant in 1779. He was educated at Westminster School until the age of fourteen, and appears afterwards to have been a very persevering student. At one time when on leave from his regiment—probably after its return from Canada in 1786—he studied classics and mathematics in France for a year, and when on detachment in the Isle of Man, read Greek for a year and a half with a Cambridge graduate. He obtained his company 31 May 1793. His first active service was with the flank companies of the 44th foot in the West Indies, at the capture of Martinique, Guadaloupe, and St. Lucia, and the subsequent loss of Guadaloupe in 1794, the rest of the regiment being meanwhile in Flanders. After his return home Donkin was brigade-major, and for several months aide-de-camp to General Musgrave, commanding at Newcastle-on-Tyne. He became major 1 Sept. 1795. He served under Sir Ralph Abercromby at St. Lucia in 1796, where the 44th lost twenty officers and over eight hundred men, chiefly from fever. Donkin was removed to Martinique in a state of insensibility, and afterwards invalided home dangerously ill. He was promoted to lieutenant-colonel 24 May 1798, and was detached in command of a provisional light battalion, composed of the light companies 11th foot, 23rd fusiliers, and 49th foot, with the expedition to Ostend, where he greatly distinguished himself, but was wounded and made prisoner. Transferred to the 11th foot, he went in command of that regiment to the West Indies in 1799, but returned in 1800.