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Brigadier-General Sir Samuel Bentham (11 January 1757 – 31 May 1831) was an England mechanical engineer and naval architect credited with numerous innovations, particularly related to naval architecture, including weapons. He was the only surviving sibling of philosopher Jeremy Bentham, with whom he had a close bond.
He was also decorated for his part in a decisive victory in the war against the Ottoman Empire, and commanded a battalion of 1,000 men in Siberia. He eventually came to have complete responsibility for Potemkin's factories and workshops, and it was while considering the difficulties of supervising the large workforce that he devised the principle of central inspection, and designed the Panopticon building which would embody that principle and was later popularized by his brother Jeremy.
In 1782 Bentham travelled along the Siberian Route to China, visiting Kyakhta and its Chinese pendant Naimatchin, and then spending over a month at the border fluvial city of Nerchinsk, where he was able to study Chinese ship designs, particularly those of junks. Back in Europe, he campaigned for the introduction of watertight compartments, an idea which he acknowledged he had got from seeing large Chinese vessels in Siberia.
Samuel returned to England in 1791, and for the next few years was involved with his brother Jeremy in trying to promote the Panopticon scheme and he designed machinery for use in it. It was during this period that he met his future wife, Mary Sophia Fordyce, the daughter of Scottish doctor and scientist George Fordyce, a friend of Jeremy Bentham. The two were married in October 1796.
In 1795 the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty asked him to design six new sailing ships with "partitions contributing to strength, and securing the ship against foundering, as practiced by the Chinese of the present day". These were built by the shipyard of Hobbs & Hellyer at Redbridge, Hampshire, and incorporated a number of other novel features such as interchangeable parts for masts and spars, allowing easy maintenance while at sea.
Bentham is credited with helping to revolutionise the production of the wooden pulley blocks used in ships' rigging, devising woodworking machinery to improve production efficiency. Bentham's 1793 patent for woodworking machinery has been called "one of the most remarkable patents ever issued by the British Patent Office". Fifty years later in a woodworking machinery patent case the Crown Judges said "the specification of his patent of 1793 is a perfect treatise on the subject; indeed the only one worth quoting that has to this day been written on the subject".
Marc Isambard Brunel had independently conceived designs for mortising and boring machines, which he showed to Bentham, who recognized the superiority of Brunel's designs. Henry Maudslay, the mechanic who built the machines, became a prominent machine tool builder. The Portsmouth Block Mills marked the arrival of mass production techniques in British manufacturing.
The Bentham family travelled a great deal in France before settling in 1820 at the Château de Restinclières, in the région of Languedoc-Roussillon. Their new house was large, with extensive grounds, and Bentham planned to cultivate the land for profit, with his son George managing most of the operation. Bentham also imported agricultural machinery as yet unknown in France, and installed a complex system of irrigation on his land. They were reasonably prosperous, but eventually returned to England in 1826. One factor in their decision was a threatened lawsuit from neighbouring farmers, who claimed that Bentham's irrigation system was diverting the local water supply.
In England, Bentham spent most of his time writing about naval matters, and conducting experiments on hull shapes. His son George Bentham, born in 1800, became a noted botanist.
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