Kelvin - Life, Labours and Legacy - R. Flood, et - Samples of art and ...

FOREWORD
Brian Pippard
In 1870, when Cambridge University were looking for their first Cavendish Professor
of Physics, they naturally thought first of Sir William Thomson who had held the
chair of Natural Philosophy in Glasgow since 1846. He had been elected when only
22 years old, and had no wish to leave his personal creation, the first significant
physics department in a British university. Indeed, he stayed there for 53 years, and
for another 8 after his retirement, still hard at work up to the time of his death at 83.
Created Baron Kelvin in 1892, he was the first British scientist to be ennobled for
his contribution to learning and to industry. As for Cambridge, they had to make do
with James Clerk Maxwell, a much less prominent figure at the time.
Nowadays Maxwell’s researches are revered and form an essential part of every
physics student’s lecture course, while Kelvin’s hardly get a mention. To be sure, we
still have the Kelvin temperature scale, but to most physicists this is little more than
a token, his pioneering ideas on thermodynamics having been overshadowed by
those of his friend James Joule and his German contemporary Rudolph Clausius.
How is it that in this, and the other fields where his innovations were so important,
the memory of one who had been the unquestioned leader of science and technology,
the versatile and prolific inventor, should fade so soon after his death? He is
not alone in this—his mentor and lifelong friend Sir George Stokes has fallen into
similar obscurity—but Kelvin was the most prominent of the British scientists who
contributed to the great advances towards the end of the ninteenth century.
Part of the explanation can be traced to his precocity. Although he outlived the
nineteenth century the young Thomson began publishing learned work as early
as 1840, still only 16 but having already spent several years at Glasgow University.
His first paper (for the sake of propriety published under a pseudonym) corrected
the Edinburgh Professor Kelland’s misunderstanding of Fourier’s great book,
which Thomson had needed but a fortnight to read and appreciate in the original
French. He learnt his mathematics from Fourier and other French mathematicians,
and something of precise experimentation from Regnault; but the more immediate
inspiration, after graduating from Cambridge, came from Faraday’s ideas on