James Prescott Joule Facts
James Prescott Joule Facts
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| Interesting James Prescott Joule Facts: |
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| James Joule was the son of a wealthy brewer and was born in Salford, Lancastershire |
| As an adult he managed the family brewery and in 1840 he became interested in replacing the brewery's steam engines with ones driven by electric motors. |
| In 1835 he studied with John Dalton at the University of Manchester with John Dalton. |
| In 1840 his paper On the Production of Heat by Voltaic Electricity he formulated Jo8ule's Law which stated that the heat produced in a wire by an electric current is proportional to the product of the resistance of the wire and the square of the current. |
| By experimenting with different materials he discovered that heat was a form of energy and in 1843 published a paper defining the mechanical equivalent of heat as the amount of work required to produce a unit of heat. |
| His paper defining the convertibility of work into heat was rejected by the British Association for the Advancement of Science so he continued his experiments to prove the validity of his argument. |
| In June 1845 he read his paper, On the Mechanical Equivalent of Heat to the British Association meeting in Cambridge and described what has become his best known experiment. |
| By 1850 his work was accepted by the scientific community and he received the Royal Medal. |
| In 1852 he and Lord Kelvin discovered that when a gas expands its temperature falls and the "Joule-Thomson effect" was the basis for the development of the refrigeration industry. |
| The standard unit of work is called the joule in his honor. |
| His other honors include Fellow of the Royal Society in 1850, the Copley Medal in 1870 and President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1872 and 1887. |
| In 1878 he was awarded a civil list pension for his services to science. |
| In 1880 he was awarded the Albert Medal of the Royal Society of Arts for "having established, after most laborious research, the true relation between heat, electricity and mechanical work thus affording to the engineer a sure guide in the application of science to industrial pursuits." |
| Joule's tombstone is engraved with the number "772.55" which was his 1878 measurement of the mechanical equivalent of heat. |
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