The life of Sir Robert Moray

Robert Moray was born in 1607 or 1608, the son of Sir Mungo Moray of Craigie, a small Perthshire laird. Nothing is known of his early life and education except for a few anecdotes that emerge from letters he wrote in later life. But these do reveal the early development of two major fields of interest which were to be lifelong: science and technology on the one hand, ethics on the other. The latter he regarded as the more important of the two, but in his mind the two were inseparable.

In philosophy Moray was a Christian stoic, and in 1658 he told a friend ‘it hath been my study, now 31 years to understand and regulate my passions’. The precision with which, so many years later, he dated the start of his lifelong attempt to achieve stoic control of the emotions to 1627 suggests that some turning-point in his life and outlook had then taken place, but we have no hint as to what it might have been. As to technological interests, Moray records that about 1623 he visited ‘the moat at Culros, when the coal was going there’. The ‘moat’ was an artificial island that had been constructed on the tidal mud flats of the Firth of Forth from which a mine shaft had been sunk. Much later, in about 1637, he was in Islington ‘in the company of some engineers who pretended great skill in aqueducts’ who were taking up old wooden water pipes and laying new ones.