William Edwin Hamilton was born at Dunsink Observatory, in the civil parish of Castleknock, Dublin. He graduated in 1857 from Trinity College Dublin and became a civil engineer, working for some years as a surveyor for railway purposes. In 1862 Hamilton left for Nicaragua with his aunt Sydney Hamilton on a venture scheme anticipating a canal project across the Isthmus of Darien. Realizing the futility of this venture, and not used to the diet and the climate, in 1864 he returned to the Observatory and lived with his parents until his father's death in 1865. In 1843 Hamilton's father had discovered the quaternions, a four-dimensional number system that extends the complex numbers, and he had published in 1853. From 1858 until his death in 1865 he worked on a second book, Elements of Quaternions, which was nearly finished when he died. Hamilton's brother Archibald Henry Hamilton, a clergyman and executor of his father’s estate, being too much engaged in his clerical duties to undertake the task, asked Hamilton to bring the Elements of Quaternions to publication. Hamilton published the manuscript as his father had left it, removing "a few typographical errors" and adding a short preface in which he wrote: "Shortly before my father’s death I had several conversations with him on the subject of the Elements. In these he spoke of anticipated applications of quaternions to electricity, and to all questions in which the idea of polarity is involved — applications which he never in his own lifetime expected to be able to fully develop, bows to be reserved for the hands of another Ulysses."
Later life in Canada
In 1872 Hamilton emigrated to Canada where he became a journalist and an editor, working in Bracebridge, Ontario at E.F. Stephenson's Free Grant Gazette, and as a Government Immigration Agent. In his introduction to Guidebook and Atlas of Muskoka, Hamilton outlines the history of the region. The name he traces to Muska Ukee, or Musquakie, a leader of the Chippewa of Lakes Huron and Simcoe. He passes over the surveying by Henry Bayfield to the Free Grants Act of 1868, notes the efforts to organize as a county in Ontario, and the $2000 bonus and tax deferral given to Beardmore Brothers tannery to locate in Bracebridge. He promotes tourism to Muskoka and celebrates the local success. However rocky soil hindered agriculture, and the period was recalled in Hardscrabble: the High Cost of Free Land. The Guidebook and Atlas was "the last concerted effort to draw settlers to Muskoka." In Hardscrabble Williams writes: "Eccentric was W.E. Hamilton, the scholar and newspaperman, with his pet snowy owl and birch bark accessories, holed up with his books above the Free Grant Gazette." In 1880 Hamilton finally settled in Chatham, where he was for some time editor of the Chatham Planet. After having lost his editorship, in 1885 he started his own Market Guide, "a four-page, pink paper tabloid,... in which he sold sufficient advertising to eke out a starved existence." For several years in the late 1880s Hamilton was an alcoholic, but according to Macfarlane he took Leslie Keeley's Gold Cure. He was cured, and became in his last years a "kindly good-natured old Irishman", known for his 'amazing erudition.'
Books
1865: Scenes in the life of a planter's daughter, etc.. George Herbert, Dublin
