Alexander Thom

Alexander Thom was a Scottish engineer, born in Carradale in 1894 and died in 1985, who is best known for his surveys of prehistoric stone circles. After graduating in engineering from the Royal College of Science and Technology and the University of Glasgow in 1914 he worked on civil engineering for the Forth Bridge and designed flying boats for the Gosport Aircraft Company. He lectured at the University of Glasgow from 1922 to 1939, helped develop its Department of Aeronautics, and during the Second World War headed the Royal Aircraft Establishment team that built the first high speed wind tunnel. Later, as professor of engineering science at Oxford, he turned to megalithic monuments, surveying more than five hundred sites with a theodolite and proposing the megalithic yard as a standard prehistoric unit of length. His classification of stone circles and his claims about their astronomical alignments helped found the field of archaeoastronomy.