In 1868 the Regius Chair of Engineering at the University of Edinburgh was founded in the Faculty of Arts, and Henry Charles Fleeming Jenkin was appointed, from the Chair of Engineering at University College, London.
Fleeming (pronounced as "Fleming", so we are informed by his one-time student Robert Louis Stevenson, who wrote an affectionate Memoir of him) Jenkin brought to the Edinburgh Chair a notable combination of scientific knowledge, practical experience and business acumen.
His reputation rested principally on his work on long-distance undersea telegraphy, and on the committee which drew up the proposals for methods of electrical measurement, subsequently ratified as international electrical standards.
In 1885 George Armstrong became the second Regius Professor of Engineering. Under his supervision the Fulton Engineering Laboratory was established in 1889, "to provide systematic instruction on experimental methods ... and to familiarise students with the strength and other physical properties of the chief materials used by engineers."
Following Armstrong's death, Thomas Hudson Beare was appointed in 1901 the third Regius Professor of Engineering. In June 1940 Professor Sir Thomas Hudson Beare, in his thirty-ninth year in the Chair of Engineering, died at the age of 81. He had seen the Engineering Department grow from a handful of students in the basement of the Old College to more than a hundred occupying what the Edinburgh University Journal called "one of the best planned and equipped engineering schools in the Empire", in the new engineering facilities at the King's Buildings which were opened in 1935. The foundation stone of the new Chemistry Building on the West Mains Farm site had been laid in 1920 by His Majesty King George V, who was pleased to allow the name of The King's Buildings to be given to the University's future science departments.
In 1946 Ronald Arnold was appointed the fourth Regius Professor of Engineering. Arnold pioneered in 1960 the division of the unitary department of engineering into separate departments of civil, mechanical and electrical engineering. Following the death of Professor Arnold in 1963 at the age of 55, Leslie Jaeger was appointed fifth Regius Professor of Engineering, from the Chair of Applied Mechanics at McGill University. By this time the Regius Chair was, in effect, the Chair of Mechanical Engineering.
James King, a former Chief Scientist in the Naval Construction Research Establishement at Dunfermline, became the sixth Regius Professor of Engineering in 1968, and in 1983 the seventh holder of the Chair was Prof Joe McGeough who was appointed from the University of Aberdeen to expand the research activities in electro-chemical machining.
There were major changes in 2002 when the individual Engineering Departments were recombined into a single School of Engineering and Electronics under the leadership of Professor Peter Grant. In 2006 the School made its first female professorial appointments with three individuals, and a fourth female chair was appointed in 2007.
Following on from Professor McGeough's retiral in September 2005, the University appointed, in 2007, Prof Peter Grant as the eighth Regius Professor of Engineering, from within the enlarged 26 person professoriat in the School.
Professor Grant had previously lead the signal processing research at Edinburgh with achievements in the design of adaptive filters and mobile communication receivers and he held a personal chair for 20 years. He was President of Eurasip, the European Association for Signal Processing from 2000-02 and recipient of the 2004 IEE Faraday medal following on from other eminent Scots such as Sir Edward Appleton and Sir Alastair McFarlane. In 2007 was elected one of the first four Eurasip signal processing fellows.
Peter Grant's appointment to the Regius chair in 2007 returns this position to an electrical engineer, as for the first Regius chair appointment of Fleeming Jenkin.