Life and Scientific Work of Peter Guthrie Tait - School of Mathematics ...

SCIENTIFIC AND LITERARY ACTIVITY 23
experiments — -the most striking I could muster—
professedly without any explanation
— in fact gave them as examples of the objects of Nat. Phil I gave a 20 m.
lecture on the nature of the study, and the arrangements for the present session,
and then plunged into the paradoxes. I reserved as the last the beautiful one of
balls and egg shells suspended on a vertical jet of water, as they cannot be shown
without some risk of a wetting to the performer and the nearest of the audience.
To-morrow I bring into play the large American induction coil, and show the
rotation of a stream of violet light in vacuo round a straight electromagnet. I shall
also show an inch spark in air and the discharge by it about 10 times per second of
a jar with about 3 square feet of tin foil. There is no self acting break— for safety
the interruption is made by a toothed wheel worked by hand—which for short
experiments is much preferable. I shall also show the huge Coin magnet (made
under Plticker's direction) which took six of us to heave it up a gently inclined
plane into the class room this afternoon '"
Outside his official University work his tireless energies were finding
other fields for exercise. He wrote most of the longer and more important
physical articles as well as the article Quaternions
for the first edition of
Chambers Encyclopaedia (1859-68) edited by Dr Findlater. His friendship
with Findlater had important consequences ; for it was he who first took Tait
out to learn the game of golf on the Bruntsfield Links, where they played
frequently together.
In 1 86 1 he began the writing of Thomson and Tail's Natural Philosophy,
while at the same time he was busy strengthening himself in the use of
quaternions and preparing his book on the subject.
with Kelvin he communicated to Good Words in 1862 an
Together
article on Energy, which was intended as a corrective to Tyndall's state-
ments regarding the historical development of the modern theory of heat.
This led to two important articles in the North British Review which finally
took shape as his admirable Sketch of Thermodynamics (1868).
Some curious speculations by Balfour Stewart as to the thermal equilibrium
within an enclosure of a number of radiating bodies moving with
different velocities led Balfour Stewart and Tait to plan a series of experiments
on the heating of a disk by rapid rotation in vacuo. The results were
communicated to the Royal Society of London ;
'
but
no definite conclusion
In these days a roomy platform a few steps above the floor both of the class room
and retiring room lay behind the long curving table on which the experiments were arranged.
About 1880 the rapidly increasing number of students compelled the addition of two new
the table and
benches, and this addition was managed by removing the platform, lowering
setting it back nearer the wall. The old Natural Philosophy lecture room is now used by
the Logic and Psychology departments.