Kelvin who invented it

Thomson garnered great esteem for these and other scientific developments, being elected to the Royal Society of London in , winning its Royal Medal in , the Copley Medal in , and serving as the president of the society from to He was the recipient of countless honorary degrees.

It was his feats in engineering, however, that gained him great wealth. The success of the first transatlantic cable had been dependent not only on his supervisory role in the project, but also on a telegraph receiver he patented known as a mirror galvanometer.

The money he received from the sale of the patented devices and his partnership in two engineering firms that specialized in consulting services for the establishment of such cables was sufficient to provide him with a very comfortable life on a baronial estate and enough funds to often entertain large numbers of guests on his ton yacht. In his later years, Thomson became embroiled in the controversy surrounding the evolutionary theory of Charles Darwin. Basing his calculations on his understanding of thermodynamics and the work of Fourier, Thomson estimated the ages of the sun and the Earth, and based on these estimations speculated that it was impossible for life to evolve over the vast expanses of time associated with Darwinism.

A less contentious interest developed by Thomson in the latter part of his life involved the sea. His yachting experiences led him to devise a number of useful devices, such as sounding equipment, an analog computer for calculating tide tables, and a type of compass. Different papers used different scales, and frequent conversions were necessary. Into this mess stepped physicists who sought to create a scale based on the fundamental physics of temperature.

Even as early as the s, there were inklings of the concept of an absolute zero. French physicist Guillaume Amontons did some of the earliest work while studying what he perceived as the springiness of air. He noticed that when a gas is cooled down, it pushes back on a liquid with less force than when it is warm. He reasoned that perhaps there was a temperature so low that air would lose all its springiness and that this would represent a physical limit to cold. During the next years, physicists including Amontons, Swiss-born J.

Lambert, and French chemist and physicist Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac did extrapolations that set this absolute zero anywhere from to degrees Celsius. In , he published a paper, On an Absolute Thermometric Scale, that stated that this absolute zero was, in fact, degrees Celsius. It is now set at But instead of setting 0 arbitrarily at the freezing point of water, the Kelvin scale sets 0 at the coldest point possible for matter. See our Places to visit section for more information. An astronomical clock has a number of different dials, showing the relative positions of the sun, stars and planets.

To construct an astronomical clock, you need to determine the motion of various celestial bodies in relation to each other. Even for the Earth alone, this is not straightforward.

The Earth does not take exactly 24 hours to make a full rotation around its axis. Also, it 'wobbles' a little on its axis. Kelvin's talent as a physicist, and interest in navigation, prompted him to create and patent his own version of an astronomical clock in This was said to be as accurate as any in existence at the time.

In this paper he described his success in sounding to a depth of fathoms just over three miles. In , Kelvin created a sounding machine to determine the depth of water below a ship. The same year, after the voyage of HMS Challenger, he stated that the old system of sounding by hemp ropes was outmoded.

Later versions of Kelvin's machine became very popular. Motor-driven versions were introduced in the early 20th century. He observed smoke rings, and proposed that atoms were shaped like vortices spiralling around each other. This was similar to the way knots loop and twist.

His hypothesis was accepted enthusiastically for about 20 years. It was later disproved by subsequent scientific research. Despite his great advances in science and engineering, towards the end of his life Kelvin was acutely aware of the failings of the classical physics that he was so instrumental in creating.

That word is failure. I know no more of electric and magnetic forces or of the relation between aether, electricity and ponderable matter, or of chemical affinity than I knew and tried to teach to my students of natural philosophy 50 years ago in my first session as professor. This lament harks back to his beginnings, to the joy that Kelvin felt in learning that you can describe how heat flows in mathematics without ever knowing what heat is.

This is the triumph and tragedy of classical physics. It is brilliant phenomenology, but falls short of explaining how the structure of atoms forces the behaviour of the material. It would be a task for others to elucidate the new phenomena — the electron, X-rays, radioactivity, the photoelectric effect, relativity — that came crowding into his last decade. We should honour him for what he achieved and for his yearning for what remained to be achieved.

He felt himself to be like Isaac Newton in old age, playing with the odd attractive pebble on a beach while an ocean of truth lay undiscovered before him, and he felt the frustration of this.

A modern comparator could be Richard Feynman. Both were brilliant mathematical physicists and problem solvers. Both made major contributions to many areas of physics, had a wide interest in other areas and were inspirational teachers.

If we are to look for one thing to remember Kelvin by, scientists might pick the absolute temperature scale as his crowning achievement; members of the public might opt for the telegraph cable across the ocean. If I succeed in making one, I understand, otherwise I do not. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.

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