Early Life
Busby was born in Alnwick, Northumberland, England, eldest son of George Busby, a miner and coalmaster of Stamford, and his wife Margaret, née Wilson, of Dunstan, Northumberland. Busby became a coal miner and later a mineral surveyor and civil engineer in Scotland, and was employed on various public work projects, including the provision of a water-supply for Leith fort. Busby received two of the Highland Society's highest premiums; firstly for inventing machinery for ascertaining the nature of rock strata by boring, and secondly for developing a method of sinking through quicksands, clay and gravel beds. In 1810 he was employed on the Irish estate of the marquess of Downshire.
He married Sarah Kennedy in 1798 in Scotland. They had 6 sons and 2 daughters, all born in Scotland.
Read more about this topic: John Busby
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“Our instructed vagrancy, which has hardly time to linger by the hedgerows, but runs away early to the tropics, and is at home with palms and banyans—which is nourished on books of travel, and stretches the theatre of its imagination to the Zambesi.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“In different hours, a man represents each of several of his ancestors, as if there were seven or eight of us rolled up in each man’s skin,—seven or eight ancestors at least, and they constitute the variety of notes for that new piece of music which his life is.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)