Joseph Clinton Robertson

Joseph Clinton Robertson (c.1787–1852), pseudonym Sholto Percy, was a Scottish patent agent, writer and periodical editor. He was a political radical prominent in the early days of the working-class press in London, and in the debates within the Mechanics Institute movement.

He was born about 1787, the son of Rev. Joseph Robertson and Isobel Mathieson of Stewarton, Scotland. Rev. Joseph Robertson was Minister of Leith Wynd Chapel, Edinburgh, Scotland, but banished from Scotland for performing illegal marriages.

Robertson founded The Mechanics' Magazine in 1823, and edited and largely wrote it until the year of his death. It was a low-priced scientific weekly, and the first publication of its kind. To begin with he was in close alliance with Thomas Hodgskin: they had met in Edinburgh. It took advantage of a stamp tax exemption for technical weeklies not dealing in news. Robertson also devised a way of generating cheap content by an early crowdsourcing technique: letters to the editor were used without payment in continuing threads.

In the Mechanics Magazine Robertson first proposed the London Mechanics' Institution. The idea was shortly taken out of his hands and those of Hodgskin, by a group around George Birkbeck. Robertson became a long term critic of the Institution.

Robertson's publishers John Knight and Henry Lacey attempted in 1826 to remove him from the editorship of the Magazine on the pretext of his quarrel with Birkbeck over the Institution; but Robertson had recourse to the law and his ownership of the title. In fact Robertson had been fraudulently passing letters of credit, claiming to a partner of "Knight, Lacey & Robertson", and successfully blackmailed his publishers, whose other publication the Pulpit had an evangelical readership, by threats to their reputation. Knight & Lacey became bankrupt that year, and in a complex series of events the Mechanics Magazine was published dually for a period, two versions of the same title being produced weekly. Lacey left for the US, and Henry Kelly was brought in by Knight as a new partner. The Bankruptcy Court dealt with the matter by requiring Robertson to work on as editor, but upheld his claim to the title. By 1829, with just one more dual issue, the legal dust had settled.

The Mechanics' Magazine covered railway inventions increasingly as the 1820s wore on, and by the end of the decade had become a partisan of the railroad lobby who were arguing against the steam carriage, which ran on the road. Drawn into the railway world, Robertson conducted the defence for John Braithwaite and John Ericsson in their patent case, on boilers, brought by Lord Cochrane and Alexander Galloway. Buoyed by the experience, he took up patents as a further profession.

In the 1830s Robertson was a railway company promoter, initially working in 1833–4 for the London & Greenwich Railway with George Landmann and George Walter. They also employed John Herapath, a contributor to the Mechanics' Magazine, as an engineer. The subscription list was padded, and, Herapath later alleged, Robertson was responsible. Walter founded the Railway Magazine, having seen the potential in the Mechanics' Magazine and its railway promotion; he brought in John Yonge Akerman as its editor.

From 1834 Robertson was working with Braithwaite promoting the Eastern Counties Railway. He had married Sophia Brooman, related to the Cobbold family of Ipswich, and the Cobbolds came in strongly to bring a railway to their part of East Anglia. Charles Blacker Vignoles as consultant engineer gave the project credibility. Matters went downhill, however, after Robertson wrote an expansive prospectus in 1834. The land deals were slow and at high premiums, with Lord Petre presenting a particular obstacle. Herapath was brought into the company, did not fit in well, and in October 1835 quarrelled spectacularly with Robertson, who exacerbated the position with Lord Petre on what appeared to be a grudge. The required Act of Parliament of 1836 nearly missed its chance.