William Thomson Facts
William Thomson Facts
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| Interesting William Thomson Facts: |
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| William Thomson was born in Belfast, Ireland where his father was a teacher of mathematics and engineering at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution. |
| In 1832 his father, James Thomson, moved his family to Glasgow to become a professor of mathematics there. |
| In 1834 William studied at the elementary school of the University of Glasgow. |
| The six Thomson children spent part of 1839 in London and summer term 1840 in Germany and the Netherlands. |
| They were tutored in several languages. |
| In 1836 William earned a prize for his translation of Lucian of Samosata's Dialogues of the Gods. |
| In 1840 he won a prize in astronomy for his Essay on the figure of the Earth. |
| Thomson studied Fourier's "Continental" mathematics. |
| Fourier had been criticized by British mathematicians and Thomson wrote a paper under the pseudonym P.Q.R. which defended Fourier. |
| James Thomson submitted William's paper to the Cambridge Mathematical Journal. |
| William's third paper, On the uniform motion of heat in homogeneous solid bodies and its connection with the mathematical theory of electricity was written in 1841. |
| In this paper he made the mathematical connection between heat conduction and electrostatics which would be described by James Clerk Maxwell as one of the most valuable foundational ideas in science. |
| In 1841 William entered Peterhouse, Cambridge, and in 1845 he graduated as Second Wrangler. |
| He won a Smith's Prize for original research. |
| In 1845 he concluded mathematically that Faraday's electric induction happens through a dielectric and not by "action at a distance." |
| He encouraged Faraday to continue the research that led to the Faraday Effect. |
| In 1846 he became chair of natural philosophy at the University of Glasgow. |
| When he attended the British Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in 1847 he heard James Prescott Jules make an ineffective attempt to discredit the caloric theory of heat. |
| This led Thomson's research in a new direction and he correctly concluded that the melting point of ice falls with pressure. |
| He was unhappy with the instruments of the time which provided an operational temperature rather than an absolute one. |
| He created 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 whatever by the number T." |
| This allowed him to be the first to calculate the value of absolute zero which in -273.25 Celsius or -459.67 Fahrenheit. |
| He was knighted for his accomplishments in 1892 and became the first scientist to be elevated to the House of Lords. |
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