# Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Bashforth, Francis

​BASHFORTH, FRANCIS (1819-1912), ballistician, was born at Thurnscoe, near Doncaster, 8 January 1819, the eldest son of John Bashforth, who farmed the glebe at Thurnscoe. He was educated at Brampton Bierlow and afterwards at Doncaster grammar school, whence he entered St. John’s College, Cambridge, as a sizar, in 1840. He was second wrangler in 1848, when John Couch Adams [q.v.] was senior wrangler. Although not at all intimate as undergraduates, the two mathematicians became firm friends in after-life. Bashforth was elected a fellow of his college in 1843, and was ordained deacon in 1850 and priest in 1851. In 1857 he accepted the college living of Minting, near Horncastle, of which he remained rector until 1908. In 1905 he was made an honorary fellow of his college.
After taking his degree Bashforth spent three years in practical civil engineering, working partly in London and partly with one of the new railway companies which were then being formed throughout the country. He was engaged on the survey of projected lines, and in this way gained that practical experience in careful measurement which afterwards proved so valuable to him in his experiments in gunnery. Bashforth was anxious to obtain a post as professor of mathematics in the provinces, but such appointments were rare in those days. In 1864, however, he was appointed professor of applied mathematics to the advanced class of artillery officers at Woolwich, which afterwards developed into the Royal Artillery College.
Bashforth’s main interest lay in the science of ballistics, and it is upon a series of experiments made by him between the years 1864 and 1880 that our present knowledge of air-resistance is founded. Great Britain entered the Crimean War with military equipment of a type which dated from the Peninsular campaigns. The muzzle-loading musket, ‘Brown Bess’, and the cast iron smoothbore cannon, firing a spherical solid shot, were still employed. The ineffectiveness of such artillery in the Crimea in general, and the exigencies of the siege of Sebastopol in particular, called for more powerful weapons, and a beginning was made there with the Lancaster rifled guns which had a bore of oval section twisted longitudinally. These guns fired an oval shell, but they were not a success because many burst on service, probably owing to the shell jamming in the bore. In the preface to his Mathematical Treatise on the Motion of Projectiles (1873) Bashforth says, ‘Feeling that the satisfactory solution of any question in gunnery depends upon the construction of a trustworthy chronograph, it therefore became my duty to recommend that a proper instrument should be procured, and that a systematic course of experiments should be undertaken to determine, in the first instance, the resistance of the air to the motion of projectiles’. He accordingly set to work to construct the chronograph, first tried in November 1865, which bears his name; and the military authorities carried out at Shoeburyness, Essex, under his direction, experiments which enabled him to determine the air-resistance. His results are set out in the treatise above mentioned, and he described his experiments in his Report on the Experiments made with the Bashforth Chronograph, (1865-1870), published by the government in 1870.
Bashforth’s ballistic experiments and the theory based upon them required continual amplification, and he received much assistance from his pupils. But in 1872, finding that under a new scheme of army reorganization the scope and importance of his post were to be reduced, he resigned his position at Woolwich. Thereafter he resumed his clerical duties at Minting, the living of which he had been allowed by the indulgence of his bishop to retain. Nevertheless, in 1873 he was appointed adviser to the War Office on questions relating to the science of artillery; and in 1878 he was requested by the government to lend his chronograph and give his assistance in a new series of experiments to be carried out with both very high and very low velocities. The invitation gave Bashforth much satisfaction, and he superintended the working out of the results of a large number of experiments made in the years 1878 to 1880. His Final Report was published in 1880, and he received from the government a grant of £2,000 for his work. He utilized his leisure by preparing, in conjunction with Professor Adams, a treatise on Capillary Action (1883), and he also published The Bashforth Chronograph (1890). Bashforth married in 1869 ​Elizabeth Jane, daughter of the Rev. Samuel Rotton Pigott, vicar of Bredgar, Kent, by whom he had one son. In 1908 he retired to Woodhall Spa, Lincolnshire, where he died 13 February 1912. Bashforth’s name will always be bracketed with that of Benjamin Robins [q.v.]; they are the two principal English authorities on the science of ballistics.
[Yorkshire Weekly Post, 16 February 1912; Memoir by J. H. Hardcastle in Arms and Explosives, August 1912; The Eagle (magazine of St. John’s College, Cambridge). vol. xxxiii, 215-16, 1912, xxxiv, 109-11, 257-60, 1918; private information.]
G. G.