Family ,
James Thomson (engineer), and William Thomson, were all professors at the
University of Glasgow, the latter two through their association with
William Rankine, another Glasgow professor, who worked to form one of the founding schools of
thermodynamics. William Thomson was born on 26 June 1824 in Belfast. His father,
James Thomson, was a teacher of mathematics and engineering at the
Royal Belfast Academical Institution and the son of an
Ulster Scots farmer. James Thomson married Margaret Gardner in 1817 and, of their children, four boys and two girls survived infancy. Margaret Thomson died in 1830 when William was six years old. 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 career in engineering. In 1832 his father was appointed professor of mathematics at the
University of Glasgow, and the family moved there in October 1833. The Thomson children were introduced to a broader
cosmopolitan experience than their father's rural upbringing, spending mid-1839 in London, and the boys were tutored in French in Paris. Much of Thomson's life during the mid-1840s was spent in
Germany and the
Netherlands. Language study was given a high priority. His sister, Anna Thomson, was the mother of the physicist
James Thomson Bottomley.
Youth of the
River Kelvin containing the
Neo-Gothic Gilmorehill campus of the University of Glasgow designed by
George Gilbert Scott, to which the university moved in the 1870s (photograph 1890s) Thomson attended the Royal Belfast Academical Institution, where his father was a professor of Mathematics in the university department. In 1834, aged 10, he began studying at the
University of Glasgow, not out of any precociousness; the university provided many of the facilities of an elementary school for able pupils, and this was a typical starting age. In school, he showed a keen interest in the classics along with his natural interest in the sciences. At age 12 he won a prize for translating
Lucian of Samosata's
Dialogues of the Gods from
Ancient Greek to English. 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. His physics tutor at this time was his namesake,
David Thomson. Throughout his life, he would work on the problems raised in the essay as a
coping strategy during times of personal stress. On the title page of this essay Thomson wrote the following lines from
Alexander Pope's "
An Essay on Man". These lines inspired Thomson to understand the natural world using the power and method of science: Thomson became intrigued with
Joseph Fourier's
Théorie analytique de la chaleur (
The Analytical Theory of Heat). He 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 under the pseudonym
P.Q.R., defending Fourier, which was submitted to
The Cambridge Mathematical Journal by his father. A second P.Q.R. paper followed almost immediately. While on holiday 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. In the paper he made remarkable connections between the mathematical theories of
thermal conduction and
electrostatics, an analogy that
James Clerk Maxwell was ultimately to describe as one of the most valuable science-forming ideas
. 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. While at Cambridge, Thomson was active in sports, athletics and
sculling, winning the Colquhoun Sculls in 1843. He 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. Under the tuition of
William Hopkins, in 1845 Thomson graduated as
second wrangler. He also won the first
Smith's Prize, which, unlike the
tripos, is a test of original research.
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." He was the fourth recipient of
The William Hopkins Prize (1876), awarded by the
Cambridge Philosophical Society for invention or discovery. In 1845 he gave the first mathematical development of
Michael 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 the mathematical technique of electrical images, which became a powerful agent in solving problems of
electrostatics, the science which deals with the forces between electrically charged bodies at rest. It was partly in response to his encouragement that Faraday undertook the research in September 1845 that led to the discovery of the
Faraday effect, which established that light and magnetic (and thus electric) phenomena were related. He was elected a fellow of St Peter's (as Peterhouse was often called at the time) in June 1845. On gaining the fellowship, 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 at the University of Glasgow. At age 22 he found himself wearing the gown of a professor in one of the oldest universities in the country and lecturing to the class of which he was a first year student a few years before.
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. Thomson was intrigued but sceptical. 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. In 1848, he extended the Carnot–Clapeyron theory further through his dissatisfaction that the
gas thermometer provided only an
operational definition of temperature. He proposed an
absolute temperature scale 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
[work], whatever be the number
T." Such a scale would be "quite independent of the physical properties of any specific substance." 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. "Reflections on the Motive Power of Heat", published by Carnot in French in 1824, the year of Lord Kelvin's birth, used −267 as an estimate of the absolute zero temperature. Thomson used data published by Regnault to
calibrate his scale against established measurements. In his publication, Thomson wrote: —But a footnote signalled his first doubts about the caloric theory, referring to Joule's
very remarkable discoveries. Surprisingly, Thomson did not send Joule a copy of his paper, but when Joule eventually read it he wrote to Thomson on 6 October, claiming that his studies had demonstrated conversion of heat into work but that he was planning further experiments. Thomson replied on 27 October, revealing that he was planning his own experiments and hoping for a reconciliation of their two sides. Thomson returned to critique Carnot's original publication and read his analysis to the
Royal Society of Edinburgh in January 1849, still convinced that the theory was fundamentally sound. However, though Thomson conducted no new experiments, over the next two years he became increasingly dissatisfied with Carnot's theory and convinced of Joule's. In February 1851 he sat down to articulate his new thinking. He was uncertain of how to frame his theory, and the paper went through several drafts before he settled on an attempt to reconcile Carnot and Joule. During his rewriting, he seems to have considered ideas that would subsequently give rise to the
second law of thermodynamics. In Carnot's theory, lost heat was
absolutely lost, but Thomson contended that it was "
lost to man irrecoverably; but not lost in the material world". Moreover, his
theological beliefs led Thomson to
extrapolate the second law to the cosmos, originating the idea of
universal heat death. Compensation would require
a creative act or an act possessing similar power, Thomson also formulated the
heat death paradox (Kelvin's paradox) in 1862, which uses the second law of thermodynamics to disprove the possibility of an infinitely old universe; this paradox was later extended by
William Rankine. In final publication, Thomson retreated from a radical departure and declared "the whole theory of the motive power of heat is founded on ... two ... propositions, due respectively to Joule, and to Carnot and Clausius." Thomson went on to state a form of the second law: In the paper, Thomson supports the theory that heat was a form of motion but admits that he had been influenced only by the thought of Sir
Humphry Davy and the experiments of Joule and
Julius Robert von Mayer, maintaining that experimental demonstration of the conversion of heat into work was still outstanding. As soon as Joule read the paper he wrote to Thomson with his comments and questions. Thus began a fruitful, though largely epistolary, collaboration between the two men, Joule conducting experiments, Thomson analysing the results and suggesting further experiments. The collaboration lasted from 1852 to 1856, its discoveries including the
Joule–Thomson effect, sometimes called the Kelvin–Joule effect, and the published results did much to bring about general acceptance of Joule's work and the
kinetic theory. Thomson published more than 650 scientific papers and applied for 70 patents (not all were issued).{{cite book |last1=Brown |first1=Laurie M. |author1-link=Laurie Brown (physicist) |title=Twentieth century physics |date=1995 |publisher=
Taylor and Francis |location=London |isbn=9780750303101 |page=2 |volume=1 == Transatlantic cable ==