12/09/1907 –22/10/1907
Inventor, doctor , alchemist, and probably a fraudster responsible for financial scandal in Scotland
Research:
Plot 360 Alexander Shiels (1865-1907)
Alexander was born 12 September 1865 in Earlston in Berwickshire to Alexander and Elizabeth Shiels. His father was a farmer and auctioneer who died when Alexander was two and he grew up in Glasgow with his mother.
Alexander attended Glasgow University and graduated as Bachelor of Medicine and Master of Surgery in 1890 and with a BSc in biological sciences in 1891. He studied under Professor John Ferguson, who included the history of alchemy among his personal interests.
Alexander collaborated with his uncle, William Elliot of Lanark on the development of milking machinery and between 1891 and 1902 he obtained 16 patents.
By 1901, he “was operating two profitable nursing homes, one in Glasgow and the other in the Regent’s Park area of London, both catering to the wives of wealthy patients. George Grandison Millar later suggested the principles followed by Shiels were purely to make money at the expense of his patients, admitting them to his homes for several months and performing bogus or unnecessary cures or minor surgery.” (Wikipedia)
In December 1902, Alexander married 22-year-old Georgina Clark, born in Ballantree, at St Pancras Registry Office. Their daughter, Alexandrina, was born in October 1903, followed by Alexander (1904) and Aileen (1907.) Apparently this marriage was kept secret from his mother and he continued to maintain the 190, Bath Street, Glasgow address where he lived with her.
From around 1903 Alexander developed his interest in metallurgy and filed several patents. “Shiels’ growing interest in metallurgy and related engineering processes, seems, however to have engendered not only a large degree of self-promotion (not to say over-selling his plans to produce a vast range of products, almost all unrealised) but also, in addition to apparently legitimate concepts, a financially disastrous flirtation with the concept of alchemy, the claimed (but chemically impossible) transmutation of base metals into gold and other precious elements; in conjunction with this he believed that he had discovered a method to make a new (but non-existent) “super alloy” of iron and copper that he termed “cuferal”, with which he hoped to revolutionalise the construction of metal structures throughout the world. To accomplish these aims he set up the Kosmoid group of metallurgical companies in 1904, acquired land at Dumbuck in the vicinity of Dumbarton, Scotland, raised a substantial amount of capital from local investors and set about constructing works that, according to his presentations to relevant local authority agencies, would involve the construction of some 6,000 homes for company workers and their families, covering the entire Dumbuck estate. The three companies that were set up to embody Shiels’ schemes were Kosmoid Tubes Ltd., manufacturers of weldless steel tubes; Kosmoid Locks Ltd…. and Kosmoid Ltd., the most secretive part of the operation, which was to operate two secret processes known respectively as the Quicksilver Process and the Copper Process, by which quicksilver (i.e., mercury) could be produced from lead and copper from iron, and apparently to also make gold in limited quantities… and, one presumes, the mysterious alloy “cuferal”, utilising the services of one John Joseph Melville, a self-confessed alchemist who had a life-long career of controversial and scandalous business dealings.” (Wikipedia)
Two of Shiels’ three companies, Kosmoid Locks Ltd. and Kosmoid Ltd., were precipitated into liquidation when Shiels abruptly disappeared from Scotland in September 1906. He moved to England and a substantial house “Grangefield” in the Northamptonshire village of Earls Barton where his family with Georgina were living.
He then set up as a consulting engineer and filed a number of patents in the area of internal combustion engines in particular.
However, in October 1907, Alexander suffered a severe stroke and collapsed on the platform of Willesden Station. He died at Earls Barton 22 October aged 42 leaving £5498 (just over half a million in 2025).
It is not known why he was buried in Rectory Lane Cemetery over fifty miles from his home.
Alexander created a huge financial scandal in Scotland involving many prominent industrialists who were left seriously out of pocket. “His third Dumbuck company, Kosmoid Tubes Ltd., was the only one to survive him, being reconstituted after its dissolution as the Dumbarton Weldless Tube Company Ltd…which was subsequently…acquired by the American firm of Babcock & Wilcox who operated the facility on the same site until 1997.” (Wikipedia)
More about his extraordinary life can be found at
https://web.archive.org/web/20190325061957/https://kosmoid.net/shiels.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Shiels
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