Robert Henry Thurston

Robert Henry Thurston (1839–1903) was an American mechanical engineer and educator. The son of a steam-engine builder in Providence, Rhode Island, he served as an engineer in the United States Navy during the Civil War, then taught at the Naval Academy and at the Stevens Institute of Technology, where he built up one of the first laboratories of mechanical engineering in the country. From 1885 until his death he directed Sibley College at Cornell University. He was the first president of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and wrote widely on steam engines, materials and friction, including A History of the Growth of the Steam-Engine (1878).