Alexander George Findlay was an English geographer and hydrographer.
He devoted himself to the compilation of geographical and hydrographical works. In 1844 he was elected a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, and was a member of its council and committees.
Findlay's atlases ofAncient and Comparative Geography were known internationally. In 1851 he completed the revision ofRichard Brookes'sGazetteer, and the same year published his first major work, on theCoasts and Islands of the Pacific Ocean, in 2 vols. of 1,400 pages.
Findlay issued six large nautical directories, which have proved invaluable to the maritime world. They included The North Atlantic Ocean, The South Atlantic Ocean, The Indian Ocean, Indian Archipelago, China, and Japan, The South Pacific Ocean, and The North Pacific Ocean. He also executed a series of charts widely used by the mercantile marine. The Society of Arts awarded Findlay its medal for his dissertation on The English Lighthouse System. Subsequently, he published Lighthouses and Coast Fog Signals of the World.
He also wrote a paper on the connection of Lake Tanganyika with the Nile, accompanying it by a comparative series of maps relating to the northern end of the lake. Findlay served on various committees appointed by theBritish Association for the Advancement of Science, and contributed the following papers to section E: at Liverpool in 1853,On the Currents of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans; Exeter, 1869,On the Gulf Stream, and its supposed influence upon the Climate of N.-W. Europe.
Findlay's publications came to 10,000 pages. He contributed several papers to the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society, the Transactions of the Royal United Service Institution, and the Transactions of the Society of Arts. As a member of the Arctic committee of the Royal Geographical Society he worked on the arguments which induced the government to send out the Alert and Discovery expedition of 1875. Findlay devoted much time to the labours of his friend David Livingstone, in central Africa, and he also investigated the sources of the Nile. For the record of the Burton and Speke explorations during 1858–59 he constructed a map of the routes traversed.
