Arthur Beverly

Arthur Beverly (22 March 1822 – 25 October 1907) was a New Zealand watchmaker, mathematician and astronomer.^[1]

He was born the son of farmer George Beverly in Stonehaven, Aberdeenshire, Scotland and was educated at home and by a local shoemaker in the evenings. He was apprenticed at 14 to an Aberdeen watchmaker and optician, where he made a reputation as a lensmaker. After he made a set of microscope lenses for Dr George Dickie, professor of botany at the University of Aberdeen, Dickie recommended him to other scientists.

In 1852 he sailed to Australia and after a spell in the goldfields moved to Melbourne to work as a watchmaker, moving on to New Zealand in 1858, where he set up a business in Dunedin. In the New Zealand Exhibition of 1865 he exhibited a clock, known as the Beverly Clock, which used the daily variation in temperature to wind itself up and a planimeter to measure the area of irregular shapes.^[2] He was awarded the Makdougall Brisbane medal of the Royal Scottish Society of Arts in 1865 for his planimeter design.

He was also very interested in astronomy and built his own 3 inch telescope. The Beverly-Begg Observatory is named in his honour. Other interests of Beverly's included botany and he was influential in the support of the Otago Museum.^[3]

He died unmarried in 1907, leaving his money to the University of Otago.