Andrew Noble

Sir Andrew Noble, 1st Baronet (13 September 1831 - 22 October 1915) was a Scottish physicist noted for his work on ballistics and .

Born at Greenock, he was educated at Edinburgh Academy and at the Royal Military Academy in Woolwich. He was commissioned in the Royal Artillery in 1849, promoted captain in 1855 and became secretary of the Royal Artillery Institution. He was secretary of the British government select committee on the replacement of smooth-bore cannon with rifled artillery and carried out research on the subject. In 1859 he became Assistant-Inspector of Artillery and in 1860 a member of the Ordnance Select Committee and of the Committee on Explosives, remaining on the committee until it was dissolved in 1880.

In 1860 he joined Armstrong's armaments works in Elswick, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, where Noble continued research into artillery, in particular inventing ways of measuring breech pressures, and later in 1862 small time intervals to determine the acceleration of projectiles as they travelled down the barrel.

He worked with Sir Frederick Abel on improving the properties of black powder. He was awarded the Order of the Bath in 1881 and knighted in 1893. He became chairman of Armstrong's company in 1900 and was made a baronet in 1902. Noble claimed that all the Japanese guns which sank the Russian fleet at the crucial battle of Tsushima in 1905, had been manufactured at Elswick.

In 1871, Andrew Noble bought Jesmond Dene House, which was originally designed by John Dobson. He later commissioned Norman Shaw and local architect Frank Rich to double the size of the house adding a west wing, billiard room, Gothic porch, Great Hall and a fleet of bedrooms. Jesmond Dene House is now a high class hotel and restaurant.