STEVENSON, Robert (1772-1850), civil engineer, was the only son of Alan Stevenson, partner in a West Indian house in Glasgow, and was born in that city 8th June 1772. Having lost his father in infancy, he removed with his mother to Edinburgh. In his youth he assisted his stepfather, Thomas Smith, in his lighthouse schemes, and at the early age of nineteen was sent to superintend the erection of a lighthouse on the island of Little Cumbrae. During successive winters he attended classes at Anderson’s College, Glasgow, and at Edinburgh university. He succeeded his stepfather, whose daughter he married in 1799, as engineer to the Board of Northern Lighthouses, and at the same time began general practice as a civil engineer. During his period of office from 1797 to 1843, he designed aud executed no fewer than eighteen lighthouses, the most important being that on the Bell Rock, begun in 1807 and completed in 1810, in which he improved considerably on the designs of Smeaton for the Eddystone lighthouse (see Lighthouse, vol. xiv. p. 616). For its illumination he introduced an improved apparatus; he was also the author of various other valuable inventions in connexion with lighting, including the intermittent and flashing lights, and the mast lantern for ships. In his general practice as a civil engineer he was employed in the construction of many county roads, in various important improvements in connexion with the approaches to Edinburgh, including that by the Calton Hill, in the erection of slips at ferries, in the construction of harbours, docks, and breakwaters, in the improvement of river and canal navigation, and in the construction of several important bridges. It was he that brought into notice the superiority of malleable iron rods for railways over the old cast ...