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William Thomson: An Introductory Biography 3
spent a month in London, and went from there to France. The family spent two
weeks in Paris together and then James took Anna and Elizabeth to Switzerland,
leaving the boys in Paris with the family servant to have daily lessons in French.
While there William (or Thomson, as we shall refer to him from now on) went to the
Bibliothèque Royale to read Laplace’s Mécanique Céleste in preparation for an 85 page
and mathematically sophisticated essay On the Figure of the Earth which won him a
University medal in his next academic year.
The next year James took his family to Germany, and in preparation the family all
took German lessons, with a teacher coming to the family home. While in Germany
James engaged another teacher to come each day and help them polish their conversational
German. For Dr James Thomson all opportunities were opportunities to
learn. Thomson inherited his father’s love and unquenchable thirst for know ledge,
and though on holiday in Germany, and under his father’s express command to leave
all other work behind and concentrate on learning German, Thomson, by now
just 16, had packed a little French reading: Fourier’s Théorie Analytique de la Chaleur.
Thomson continues the story:
‘Going that summer to Germany with my father and my brothers and sisters, I took Fourier
with me. My father took us to Germany and insisted that all work should be left behind,
so that the whole of our time could be given to learning German. We went to Frankfort,
where my father took a house for two months . . . Now just two days before leaving Glasgow
I had got Kelland’s book (Theory of Heat, 1837), and was shocked to be told that Fourier was
mostly wrong. So I put Fourier in my box, and used in Frankfort to go down to the cellar
surreptitiously every day to read a bit of Fourier. When my father discovered it he was not
very severe upon me.’ 4
James Thomson’s lack of severity is probably explained by the fact that his son claimed
that Philip Kelland, the Professor of Mathematics at Edinburgh was wrong in his criticisms
of Fourier. Although initially incredulous of his son’s claims, a closer examination
showed that they were accurate, and Thomson wrote the matter up in what was to be
his first published paper, which appeared in May 1841 in the Cambridge Mathematical
Journal, with the author simply designated as ‘P. Q. R.’ Ivor Grattan Guinness gives
more detail on Thomson’s interaction with Fourier’s work in Chapter 3.
A CAMBRIDGE STUDENT
Thomson’s strong abilities in mathematics were clear to all, and the obvious
place for him to study after finishing Glasgow was Cambridge. However, there
were concerns that graduating from Glasgow might disadvantage his prospects
at Cambridge, and so, although both Thomson and his brother James passed the