throbbing light machine

I've got to ask: who's got the info on his name? Google/various sociological database searches tell me that Sherlock means either "fair-haired" or "short-haired," and that it's a common surname. So what possessed Conan Doyle to give it to his protagonist as a prenomen? Did he ever discuss the name, or what it meant to him?

It's one of those things I'd never noticed, and then I started reading fic and the lovely strangeness of it really leaped out at me. I find it inexplicably - and intensely - sexy.