John Anderson was born on September 26, 1726, at the manse of Rosneath in Dunbartonshire, Scotland, the son of the Reverend James Anderson and his wife Margaret Turner. The household was one of religious and intellectual seriousness: his father and grandfather before him had been prominent ministers of the Church of Scotland, and the expectation of public service through learning was embedded in the family's identity. When his father died, the young Anderson was raised by an aunt in Stirling, where he attended grammar school and absorbed the disciplined habits of thought that would characterize his entire career. He graduated with an MA from the University of Glasgow in 1745.
The timing of his graduation coincided with one of the most turbulent moments in eighteenth-century British history. In 1745 the Jacobite Rising challenged Hanoverian rule from the Scottish Highlands, and Anderson served as an officer in the Hanoverian Army during the campaign. It was an early indication of a mind not content to remain within academic walls — he was throughout his life a man who believed that ideas must be tested against the practical world.
His university career began formally when he was appointed Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Glasgow in 1755. Two years later he moved to the Chair of Natural Philosophy, which he would hold until his death in 1796, making him the longest-serving natural philosophy lecturer at the university during the eighteenth century. In 1760 he was formally confirmed in the natural philosophy post that suited him far better, and he began to concentrate his energies on physics, practical mechanics, and the relationship between scientific principles and the working world.
Anderson possessed an infectious enthusiasm for experiment. He loved demonstrations, physical apparatus, and the theatrical possibilities of scientific display — qualities that earned him the affectionate nickname Jolly Jack Phosphorus, derived from his fondness for setting off explosions and fireworks during lectures. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, bringing him into contact with many of the leading scientific minds of the age, and he was a joint founder of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, an institution that would prove central to the Scottish Enlightenment. He was acquainted with Benjamin Franklin, and in 1772 he installed the first lightning conductor in Glasgow, translating Franklin's theoretical work on electrical conductivity into practical urban infrastructure.
His encouragement of James Watt in the development of steam power represents one of the most consequential acts of scientific patronage in the history of the Industrial Revolution. The relationship between Anderson and Watt illustrates something essential about the Glasgow intellectual milieu of the mid-eighteenth century: it was a world in which academic scientists and practical engineers moved in the same circles, shared tools and ideas, and understood improvement as a shared enterprise. Anderson wrote the pioneering textbook Institutes of Physics, published in 1786, which proved durable enough to go through five editions in ten years.
But Anderson's deepest commitment was not to university education in the conventional sense. His greatest passion was the provision of useful learning to working men and women — the craftsmen, mechanics, and artisans who formed the industrial backbone of Scottish society but who had been systematically excluded from the universities of the day. Alongside his regular academic duties, he gave public evening lectures specifically designed for this audience, concentrating on experiments and demonstrations that illustrated the scientific principles underlying the trades and industries in which his listeners worked. These lectures were immensely popular and represented something genuinely new: a deliberate attempt to bring the fruits of Enlightenment science to the people who most needed them.
Anderson's radical politics extended beyond education. He was a supporter of the French Revolution and in 1791 invented a new type of six-pound gun, which he presented to the National Convention in Paris as, in his own words, the gift of Science to Liberty. During his visit to France, neighboring Germany imposed a blockade on French newspapers. Anderson responded by suggesting that pamphlets be attached to small hydrogen balloons and released to drift over the frontier — a proposal that was actually carried out, with each balloon bearing an inscription translated as calling on oppressed men to maintain their rights by arms. It was an act characteristic of a man who saw no contradiction between scientific ingenuity and political commitment.
When Anderson died in Glasgow on January 13, 1796, at the age of sixty-nine, he left behind a will that translated his educational convictions into permanent institutional form. He bequeathed his property for the foundation in Glasgow of a school devoted to useful learning, called Anderson's Institution or the Andersonian University. The new institution operated on explicitly non-discriminatory principles: it was open to working men and women on equal terms, without the social or gender restrictions that governed the established universities. Among those whose lives it shaped was David Livingstone, a young mill worker who used the Institution's resources to educate himself and eventually became the foremost African explorer of the Victorian age. Anderson's Institution underwent numerous name changes and mergers over the following century and a half before arriving at its present identity as the University of Strathclyde. The physics building, the main library — the Andersonian Library — and the central campus in Glasgow are all named in Anderson's honor. He is buried with his grandfather in Ramshorn Cemetery on Ingram Street in Glasgow, and in January 1996 the University of Glasgow sent representatives to lay a wreath marking the bicentennial of his death.
