Life
Osborne Reynolds was born in Belfast and moved with his parents soon afterward to Dedham, Essex. His father worked as a school headmaster and clergyman, but was also a very able mathematician with a keen interest in mechanics. The father took out a number of patents for improvements to agricultural equipment, and the son credits him with being his chief teacher as a boy. Osborne Reynolds attended Queens' College, Cambridge and graduated in 1867 as the seventh wrangler in mathematics. In 1868 he was appointed professor of engineering at Owens College in Manchester (now the University of Manchester), becoming in that year one of the first professors in UK university history to hold the title of "Professor of Engineering". This professorship had been newly created and financed by a group of manufacturing industrialists in the Manchester area, and they also had a leading role in selecting the 25 year old Reynolds to fill the position.
Reynolds showed an early aptitude and liking for the study of mechanics. In his late teens, for the year before entering university, he went to work as an apprentice at the workshop of Edward Hayes, a well known shipbuilder in Stony Stratford, where he obtained practical experience in the manufacture and fitting out of coastal steamers (and thus gained an early appreciation of the practical value of understanding fluid dynamics). For the year immediately following his graduation from Cambridge he again took up a post with an engineering firm, this time as a practising civil engineer in the London (Croydon) sewage transport system. He had chosen to study mathematics at Cambridge because, in his own words in his 1868 application for the professorship, "From my earliest recollection I have had an irresistible liking for mechanics and the physical laws on which mechanics as a science is based.... my attention drawn to various mechanical phenomena, for the explanation of which I discovered that a knowledge of mathematics was essential."
Reynolds remained at Owens College for the rest of his career — in 1880 the college became a constituent college of the newly founded Victoria University. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1877 and awarded the Royal Medal in 1888. He retired in 1905.
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