ABSTRACT
John Alexander McClelland was an eminent member of the succession of distinguished physicists who emerged from the northern part of Ireland in the second half of the nineteenth century. He was born on 1 December 1870, the youngest of eleven children of an Ulster farmer, William McClelland and his wife Margeret, of Dunallis, Macosquin, near Coleraine. Family lore has it that ‘John was no good at rounding up sheep as his mind was always on other things’ and that he ‘always had his nose in a book and wouldn’t even turn a beast in the yard’. This intellectual tendency, and perhaps increasing family prosperity, enabled him to follow amore academic career path. On 24 August 1885, he entered the upper school of the Coleraine Academical Institution, where he showed promise of great ability.
