William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin

The Right Honourable William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin, GCVO, OM, PC, PRS (26 June 1824–17 December 1907) was a Scottish-Irish mathematical physicist and engineer, an outstanding leader in the physical sciences of the 19th century. He did important work in the mathematical analysis of electricity and thermodynamics, and did much to unify the emerging discipline of physics in its modern form.

Early life and work

Family

William's father was Dr. James Thomson, the son of a Belfast farmer. James received little youthful instruction in Ireland but, when 24 years old, started to study for half the year at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, while working as a teacher back in Belfast for the other half. On graduating, he became a mathematics teacher at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution. He married Margaret Gardner in 1817 and, of their children four boys and two girls survived infancy.

Related Topics:
Belfast - Farmer - Ireland - University of Glasgow - Scotland - Teacher - Mathematics - Royal Belfast Academical Institution - 1817

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William, and his elder brother James, were tutored at home by their father while the younger boys were tutored by their elder sisters. James was intended to benefit from the major share of his father's encouragement, affection and financial support and was prepared for a fashionable career in engineering. However, James was a sickly youth and proved unsuited to a sequence of failed apprenticeships. William soon became his father's favourite.

Related Topics:
Engineering - Apprentice

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In 1832, the father was appointed professor of mathematics at Glasgow and the family relocated there in October 1833. The Thomson children were introduced to a broader cosmopolitan experience than their father's rural upbringing, spending the summer of 1839 in London and, the boys, being tutored in French in Paris. The summer of 1840 was spent in Germany and the Netherlands. Language study was given a high priority.

Related Topics:
1832 - Glasgow - 1833 - 1839 - London - French - Paris - 1840 - Germany - Netherlands

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Youth

William began study at Glasgow University in 1834 at the age of 10, not out of any precociousness; the University provided many of the facilities of an elementary school for abler pupils and this was a typical starting age. In 1839, John Pringle Nichol, the professor of astronomy, took the chair of natural philosophy. Nichol updated the curriculum, introducing the new mathematical works of Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier. The mathematical treatment much impressed Thomson.

Related Topics:
1834 - 1839 - John Pringle Nichol - Astronomy - Natural philosophy - Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier

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In the academic year 1839-1840, Thomson won the class prize in astronomy for his Essay on the figure of the Earth which showed an early facility for mathematical analysis and creativity. Throughout his life, he would work on the problems raised in the essay as a coping strategy at times of personal stress.

Related Topics:
1840 - Astronomy - Coping - Stress

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Thomson became intrigued with Fourier's Théorie analytique de la chaleur and committed himself to study the "Continental" mathematics resisted by a British establishment still working in the shadow of Sir Isaac Newton. Unsurprisingly, Fourier's work had been attacked by domestic mathematicians, Philip Kelland authoring a critical book. The book motivated Thomson to write his first published scientific paper{{ref|KT11}} under the pseudonym P.Q.R., defending Fourier, and submitted to the Cambridge Mathematical Journal by his father. A second P.Q.R paper followed almost immediately{{ref|KT12}}.

Related Topics:
British - Isaac Newton - Philip Kelland - Scientific paper - Pseudonym

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While vacationing with his family in Lamlash in 1841, he wrote a third, more substantial, P.Q.R. paper On the uniform motion of heat in homogeneous solid bodies, and its connection with the mathematical theory of electricity.{{ref|KT13}} In the paper he made remarkable connections between the mathematical theories of heat conduction and electrostatics, an analogy that James Clerk Maxwell was ultimately to describe as one of the most valuable science-forming ideas.{{ref|JCM}}

Related Topics:
Lamlash - Heat conduction - Electrostatics - Analogy - James Clerk Maxwell

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Cambridge

William's father was able to make a generous provision for his favourite son's education and, in 1841, installed him, with extensive letters of introduction and ample accommodation, at Peterhouse, Cambridge. In 1845 Thomson graduated as second wrangler. However, he won a Smith's Prize, sometimes regarded as a better test of originality than the tripos. Robert Leslie Ellis, one of the examiners, is said to have declared to another examiner You and I are just about fit to mend his pens.{{ref|S5}}

Related Topics:
1841 - Peterhouse, Cambridge - 1845 - Wrangler - Smith's Prize - Tripos

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While at Cambridge, Thomson was active in sports and athletics. He won the Silver Sculls, and rowed in the winning boat of the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race. He also took a lively interest in the classics, music, and literature; but the real love of his intellectual life was the pursuit of science. The study of mathematics, physics, and in particular, of electricity, had captivated his imagination.

Related Topics:
Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race - Mathematics - Electricity

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In 1845 he gave the first mathematical development of Faraday's idea that electric induction takes place through an intervening medium, or "dielectric", and not by some incomprehensible "action at a distance". He also devised a hypothesis of electrical images, which became a powerful agent in solving problems of electrostatics, or the science which deals with the forces of electricity at rest. It was partly in response to his encouragement that Faraday undertook the research in September of 1845 that led to the discovery of the Faraday effect, which established that light and magnetic (and thus electric) phenomena were related.

Related Topics:
Faraday - Faraday effect

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On gaining a fellowship at his college, he spent some time in the laboratory of the celebrated Henri Victor Regnault, at Paris; but in 1846 he was appointed to the chair of natural philosophy in the University of Glasgow. At twenty-two he found himself wearing the gown of a learned professor in one of the oldest Universities in the country, and lecturing to the class of which he was a freshman but a few years before.

Related Topics:
Henri Victor Regnault - Paris - Philosophy

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Thermodynamics

By 1847, Thomson had already gained a reputation as a precocious and maverick scientist when he attended the British Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in Oxford. At that meeting, he heard James Prescott Joule making yet another of his, so far, ineffective attempts to discredit the caloric theory of heat and the theory of the heat engine built upon it by Sadi Carnot and Émile Clapeyron. Joule argued for the mutual convertibility of heat and mechanical work and for their mechanical equivalence.

Related Topics:
1847 - British Association for the Advancement of Science - Oxford - James Prescott Joule - Caloric theory - Heat - Heat engine - Sadi Carnot - Émile Clapeyron - Mechanical work

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Thomson was intrigued but skeptical. Though he felt that Joule's results demanded theoretical explanation, he retreated into an even deeper commitment to the Carnot-Clapeyron school. He predicted that the melting point of ice must fall with pressure, otherwise its expansion on freezing could be exploited in a perpetuum mobile. Experimental confirmation in his laboratory did much to bolster his beliefs.

Related Topics:
Melting point - Ice - Pressure - Perpetuum mobile

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In 1848, he extended the Carnot-Clapeyron theory still further through his dissatisfaction that the gas thermometer provided only an operational definition of temperature. He proposed an absolute temperature scale{{ref|Chang}} in which a unit of heat descending from a body A at the temperature T° of this scale, to a body B at the temperature (T-1)°, would give out the same mechanical effect ', whatever be the number T. Such a scale would be quite independent of the physical properties of any specific substance.{{ref|KT1}} By employing such a "waterfall", Thomson postulated that a point would be reached at which no further heat (caloric) could be transferred, the point of absolute zero about which Guillaume Amontons had speculated in 1702. Thomson used data published by Regnault to calibrate his scale against established measurements.

Related Topics:
1848 - Gas thermometer - Operational definition - Absolute temperature - Absolute zero - Guillaume Amontons - 1702 - Calibrate

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In his publication, Thomson wrote:

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:"... the conversion of heat (or caloric) into mechanical effect is probably impossible, certainly undiscovered"

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