Arthur Beverly

Arthur Beverly was one of the cleverest men in early Dunedin, a poor boy who made good by educating himself. He was born on a farm in Aberdeenshire in 1822 and received only limited education from his local parish school and at night classes. When he was 13 he was apprenticed to an optician and watchmaker in Aberdeen. He specialised in making lenses and soon developed a reputation among scientists for the high quality of his work. He emigrated to Melbourne where he tried his hand at gold mining but quickly realised he could do better by practising his trade.

Beverly followed a friend over to Dunedin on the Thomas and Henry in 1858. The gold rush years of the early 1860s were a profitable time for him and he wisely invested his income in property. This served him well when business declined and he was able to retire and devote himself to his interest in science.

Beverly was largely self-taught but very well informed on scientific matters and adept at applying the scientific method to practical problems. He was regularly consulted by mining engineers and surveyors on the Otago goldfields and his opinions were highly respected. He was an inveterate inventor who developed a range of scientific devices, as well as clocks, microscopes, telescopes, chronometers and barometers. A planimeter that he exhibited at the 1865 Dunedin Exhibition earned him a prestigious award from the Royal Scottish Society of the Arts. He also developed a method of accurately measuring distance with long steel tapes that became popular throughout the world. Botany and mathematics were two other passions in which Beverley broke new ground and earned further esteem in scientific circles.

Arthur Beverly was a small man who was unprepossessing in appearance and diffident in publicising his discoveries. He had to be encouraged by friends to publish many of his scientific papers. He was very happy to share his knowledge, however, and regularly wrote a column in the Otago Witness newspaper answering readers’ queries on scientific matters. He wrote another column for the Evening Star on astronomy.

When he died a bachelor in 1907, he left his considerable estate to the University of Otago to fund the teaching of science and to help young people of either sex who had ‘talent and industry but not wealth’. The bequest is still funding university prizes and fellowships in physics and maths. The Beverly-Begg observatory also commemorates the memory of one of pioneer Dunedin’s finest scientific minds.