William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin

Lord Kelvin
A photograph of Thomson, likely from the late-nineteenth century.
Born
26 June 1824 Belfast, County Antrim, Ireland
Died
17 December 1907 Largs, Ayrshire, Scotland

William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin OM GCVO PC PRS FRSE (June 26, 1824 – December 17, 1907) was a mathematical physicist, engineer, and outstanding leader in the physical sciences of the nineteenth century widely known for developing the Kelvin scale of absolute temperature measurement. He was influential in making energy the fundamental concept for the development and expression of physical theories. He was also active in the laying of the first trans-Atlantic submarine communications cable in 1866, contributing both theoretical and practical support to the project.

Early life and work

Family

William Thomson was born on June 26, 1824 in Belfast. His father was Dr. James Thomson, a professor of mathematics at the Royal Academical Institution of Belfast. His mother was Margaret Gardiner. The couple had four boys and two girls, Thomson being the second eldest son. The family was raised in the Presbyterian Christian tradition. Thomson's elder brother, James, became an engineering professor.

Youth

When Thomson was six, his mother died; his father then assuming a greater role in his education that included tutoring sessions. In 1832, Thomson's father secured a professorship at the University of Glasgow. Thomson began study at Glasgow University in 1834 at the age of 11, not out of any precociousness; the University provided many of the facilities of an elementary school for abler pupils and this was a typical starting age. In 1839, John Pringle Nichol, the professor of astronomy, took the chair of natural philosophy. Nichol updated the curriculum, introducing the new mathematical works of Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier. The mathematical treatment was to influence Thomson in his later work. Between 1838 and 1841, he took up the study of astronomy, physics and chemistry. He also read the works of mathematicians of the French school that included Laplace, Lagrange and Legendre.

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.

Thomson became intrigued with Fourier's Théorie analytique de la chaleur and committed himself to study the "Continental" mathematics resisted by a British establishment still working in the shadow of Sir Isaac Newton. The book motivated Thomson to write his first published scientific paper under the pseudonym P.Q.R., defending Fourier, and submitted to the Cambridge Mathematical Journal by his father. A second P.Q.R paper followed almost immediately.

While vacationing 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 heat 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 favorite son's education and, in 1841, installed him, with extensive letters of introduction and ample accommodation, at Peterhouse, Cambridge. In 1845 Thomson graduated as second wrangler, the runner-up to the first prize. However, he won a Smith's Prize, sometimes regarded as a better test of originality than the tripos. 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.

While at Cambridge, Thomson was active in sports and athletics. He won the Silver Sculls, and rowed in the winning boat of the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race. He also 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.

In 1845 he gave the first mathematical development of 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 a hypothesis of electrical images, which became a powerful agent in solving problems of electrostatics, or the science which deals with the forces of electricity at rest. It was partly in response to his encouragement that Faraday undertook the research in September of 1845 that led to the discovery of the Faraday effect, the change in the plane of polarization of light under the influence of a magnetic field, which established that light and magnetic (and thus electric) phenomena were related.

On gaining a fellowship at his college, he spent some time in the laboratory of the celebrated Henri Victor Regnault, at Paris, where he came in contact with notable scientists and mathematicians such as Biot and Cauchy. He also familiarized himself with the mathematical work of George Green, which would have important applications in the theory of electricity and magnetism. In 1846 he was appointed to the chair of natural philosophy in the University of Glasgow. At twenty-two he found himself wearing the gown of a learned professor in one of the oldest Universities in the country, and lecturing to the class of which he was a freshman but 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.

The Absolute Temperature Scale

In 1848, Thomson extended the Carnot-Clapeyron theory still 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. Thomson used data published by Regnault to calibrate his scale against established measurements. The zero point on his scale, absolute zero, was found to be equivalent to minus 273.15 degrees centigrade as defined by an ideal gas thermometer.

In February 1851 he attempted to reconcile Carnot and Joule. He 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:

It is impossible, by means of inanimate material agency, to derive mechanical effect from any portion of matter by cooling it below the temperature of the coldest of the surrounding objects.

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 analyzing the results and suggesting further experiments. The collaboration lasted from 1852 to 1856, during which they discovered that a gas cools upon expansion, a phenomenon now known as the Joule-Thomson effect.

Transatlantic Cable

Data transmission through a conductor

Though now eminent in the academic field, Thomson was obscure to the general public. In September 1852, he married childhood sweetheart Margaret Crum, but her health broke down on their honeymoon and, over the next 17 years, Thomson was distracted by her suffering. On October 16, 1854, George Gabriel Stokes wrote to Thomson to try to re-interest him in work by asking his opinion on some experiments of Michael Faraday on the proposed transatlantic telegraph cable.

Michael Faraday had demonstrated how the construction of a cable would limit the rate at which messages could be sent — in modern terms, the bandwidth. Thomson jumped at the problem and published his response that month. He expressed his results in terms of the data rate that could be achieved and the economic consequences in terms of the potential revenue of the transatlantic undertaking. In a further 1855 analysis, Thomson stressed the impact that the design of the cable would have on its profitability.

Thomson contended that the speed of a signal through a given core was inversely proportional to the square of the length of the core. Thomson's results were disputed at a meeting of the British Association in 1856 by Wildman Whitehouse, the electrician of the Atlantic Telegraph Company. Whitehouse had possibly misinterpreted the results of his own experiments but was doubtless feeling financial pressure as plans for the cable were already well underway. He believed that Thomson's calculations implied that the cable must be "abandoned as being practically and commercially impossible."

Thomson attacked Whitehouse's contention in a letter to the popular Athenaeum magazine, pitching himself into the public eye. Thomson recommended a larger conductor with a larger cross section of insulation. However, he thought Whitehouse no fool and suspected that he may have the practical skill to make the existing design work. Thomson's work had, however, caught the eye of the project's undertakers and in December 1856, he was elected to the board of directors of the Atlantic Telegraph Company.

Scientist to engineer

Thomson became scientific adviser to a team with Whitehouse as chief electrician and Sir Charles Tilston Bright as chief engineer but Whitehouse had his way with the specification, supported by Faraday and Samuel F. B. Morse.

Thomson sailed on board the cable-laying ship HMSS Agamemnon in August 1857, with Whitehouse confined to land owing to illness, but the voyage ended after just 380 miles when the cable parted. Thomson contributed to the effort by publishing in the Engineer the whole theory of the stresses involved in the laying of a submarine cable, and showed that when the line is running out of the ship, at a constant speed, in a uniform depth of water, it sinks in a slant or straight incline from the point where it enters the water to that where it touches the bottom.

Thomson developed a complete system for operating a submarine telegraph that was capable of sending a character every 3.5 seconds. He patented the key elements of his system, the mirror galvanometer and the siphon recorder, in 1858.

However, Whitehouse still felt able to ignore Thomson's many suggestions and proposals. It was not until Thomson convinced the board that using a purer copper for replacing the lost section of cable would improve data capacity, that he first made a difference to the execution of the project.

The board insisted that Thomson join the 1858 cable-laying expedition, without any financial compensation, and take an active part in the project. In return, Thomson secured a trial for his mirror galvanometer, about which the board had been unenthusiastic, alongside Whitehouse's equipment. However, Thomson found the access he was given unsatisfactory and the Agamemnon had to return home following the disastrous storm of June 1858. Back in London, the board was on the point of abandoning the project and mitigating their losses by selling the cable. Thomson, Cyrus Field and Curtis M. Lampson argued for another attempt and prevailed, Thomson insisting that the technical problems were tractable. Though employed in an advisory capacity, Thomson had, during the voyages, developed real engineer's instincts and skill at practical problem-solving under pressure, often taking the lead in dealing with emergencies and being unafraid to lend a hand in manual work. A cable was finally completed on August 5.

Disaster and triumph

Thomson's fears were realized and Whitehouse's apparatus proved insufficiently sensitive and had to be replaced by Thomson's mirror galvanometer. Whitehouse continued to maintain that it was his equipment that was providing the service and started to engage in desperate measures to remedy some of the problems. He succeeded only in fatally damaging the cable by applying 2,000 V. When the cable failed completely Whitehouse was dismissed, though Thomson objected and was reprimanded by the board for his interference. Thomson subsequently regretted that he had acquiesced too readily to many of Whitehouse's proposals and had not challenged him with sufficient energy.

A joint committee of inquiry was established by the Board of Trade and the Atlantic Telegraph Company. Most of the blame for the cable's failure was found to rest with Whitehouse. The committee found that, though underwater cables were notorious in their lack of reliability, most of the problems arose from known and avoidable causes. Thomson was appointed one of a five-member committee to recommend a specification for a new cable. The committee reported in October 1863.

In July 1865 Thomson sailed on the cable-laying expedition of the SS Great Eastern but the voyage was again dogged with technical problems. The cable was lost after 1,200 miles had been laid and the expedition had to be abandoned. A further expedition in 1866 managed to lay a new cable in two weeks and then go on to recover and complete the 1865 cable. The enterprise was now feted as a triumph by the public and Thomson enjoyed a large share of the adulation. Thomson, along with the other principals of the project, was knighted on November 10, 1866.

To exploit his inventions for signalling on long submarine cables, Thomson now entered into a partnership with C.F. Varley and Fleeming Jenkin. In conjunction with the latter, he also devised an automatic curb sender, a kind of telegraph key for sending messages on a cable.

Later expeditions

Thomson took part in the laying of the French Atlantic submarine communications cable of 1869, and with Jenkin was engineer of the Western and Brazilian and Platino-Brazilian cables, assisted by vacation student James Alfred Ewing. He was present at the laying of the Pará to Pernambuco section of the Brazilian coast cables in 1873.

Thomson's wife had died on June 17, 1870 and he resolved to make changes in his life. Already addicted to seafaring, in September he purchased a 126 ton schooner, the Lalla Rookh and used it as a base for entertaining friends and scientific colleagues. His maritime interests continued in 1871 when he was appointed to the board of enquiry into the sinking of the HMS Captain.

In June 1873, Thomson and Jenkin were onboard the Hooper, bound for Lisbon with 2,500 miles of cable when the cable developed a fault. An unscheduled 16-day stop-over in Madeira followed and Thomson became good friends with Charles R. Blandy and his three daughters. On May 2, 1874 he set sail for Madeira on the Lalla Rookh. As he approached the harbour, he signalled to the Blandy residence Will you marry me? and Fanny signalled back Yes Thomson married Fanny, 13 years his junior, on June 24, 1874.

Thomson & Tait: Treatise on Natural Philosophy

Over the period 1855 to 1867, Thomson collaborated with Peter Guthrie Tait on a text book that unified the various branches of physical science under the common principle of energy. Published in 1867, the Treatise on Natural Philosophy did much to define the modern discipline of physics.

Marine

Thomson's tide-predicting machine

Thomson was an enthusiastic yachtsman, his interest in all things relating to the sea perhaps arising, or at any rate fostered, from his experiences on the Agamemnon and the SS Great Eastern.

Thomson introduced a method of deep-sea sounding, in which a steel piano wire replaces the ordinary land line. The wire glides so easily to the bottom that "flying soundings" can be taken while the ship is going at full speed. A pressure gauge to register the depth of the sinker was added by Thomson.

About the same time he revived the Sumner method of finding a ship's place at sea, and calculated a set of tables for its ready application. He also developed a tide predicting machine.

During the 1880s, Thomson worked to perfect the adjustable compass in order to correct errors arising from magnetic deviation owing to the increasing use of iron in naval architecture. Thomson's design was a great improvement on the older instruments, being steadier and less hampered by friction, the deviation due to the ship's own magnetism being corrected by movable masses of iron at the binnacle. Thomson's innovations involved much detailed work to develop principles already identified by George Biddell Airy and others but contributed little in terms of novel physical thinking. Thomson's energetic lobbying and networking proved effective in gaining acceptance of his instrument by The Admiralty.

Scientific biographers of Thomson, if they have paid any attention at all to his compass innovations, have generally taken the matter to be a sorry saga of dim-witted naval administrators resisting marvellous innovations from a superlative scientific mind. Writers sympathetic to the Navy, on the other had, portray Thomson as a man of undoubted talent and enthusiasm, with some genuine knowledge of the sea, who managed to parlay a handful of modest ideas in compass design into a commercial monopoly for his own manufacturing concern, using his reputation as a bludgeon in the law courts to beat down even small claims of originality from others, and persuading the Admiralty and the law to overlook both the deficiencies of his own design and the virtues of his competitors. The truth, inevitably, seems to lie somewhere between the two extremes.

Charles Babbage had been among the first to suggest that a lighthouse might be made to signal a distinctive number by occultations of its light but Thomson pointed out the merits of the Morse code for the purpose, and urged that the signals should consist of short and long flashes of the light to represent the dots and dashes.

Electrical standards

Thomson did more than any other electrician up to his time to introduce accurate methods and apparatus for measuring electricity. As early as 1845 he pointed out that the experimental results of William Snow Harris were in accordance with the laws of Coulomb. In the Memoirs of the Roman Academy of Sciences for 1857 he published a description of his new divided ring electrometer, based on the old electroscope of Johann Gottlieb Friedrich von Bohnenberger and he introduced a chain or series of effective instruments, including the quadrant electrometer, which cover the entire field of electrostatic measurement. He invented the current balance, also known as the Kelvin balance or Ampere balance (sic), for the precise specification of the Ampere, the standard unit of electric current.

In 1893, Thomson headed an international commission to decide on the design of the Niagara Falls power station. Despite his previous belief in the superiority of direct current electric power transmission, he was convinced by Nikola Tesla's demonstration of three-phase alternating current power transmission at the Chicago World's Fair of that year and agreed to use Tesla's system. In 1896, Thomson said "Tesla has contributed more to electrical science than any man up to his time."

Geology and theology

Statue of Lord Kelvin; Belfast Botanic Gardens.

Thomson remained a devout believer in Christianity throughout his life: attendance at chapel was part of his daily routine, though he might not identify with fundamentalism if he were alive today. He saw his Christian faith as supporting and informing his scientific work, as is evident from his address to the annual meeting of the Christian Evidence Society, May 23, 1889.

One of the clearest instances of this interaction is in his estimate of the age of the Earth. Given his youthful work on the figure of the Earth and his interest in heat conduction, it is no surprise that he chose to investigate the Earth's cooling and to make historical inferences of the earth's age from his calculations. Thomson believed in an instant of Creation but he was no creationist in the modern sense. He contended that the laws of thermodynamics operated from the birth of the universe and envisaged a dynamic process that saw the organization and evolution of the solar system and other structures, followed by a gradual "heat death." He developed the view that the Earth had once been too hot to support life and contrasted this view with that of uniformitarianism, that conditions had remained constant since the indefinite past. He contended that "This earth, certainly a moderate number of millions of years ago, was a red-hot globe …."

After the publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species in 1859, Thomson saw evidence of the relatively short habitable age of the Earth as tending to contradict an evolutionary explanation of biological diversity. He noted that the sun could not have possibly existed long enough to allow the slow incremental development by evolution — unless some energy source beyond what he or any other Victorian era person knew of was found. He was soon drawn into public disagreement with Darwin's supporters John Tyndall and T.H. Huxley. In his response to Huxley’s address to the Geological Society of London (1868) he presented his address "Of Geological Dynamics," (1869) which, among his other writings, set back the scientific acceptance that the earth must be of very great age.

Thomson ultimately settled on an estimate that the Earth was 20 million to 40 million years old. Shortly before his death however, Becquerel's discovery of radioactivity and Marie Curie's studies with uranium ores provided the insight into the 'energy source beyond' that would power the sun for the long time-span required by the theory of evolution.

Limits of Classical Physics

In 1884, Thomson delivered a series of lectures at Johns Hopkins University in the U.S. in which he attempted to formulate a physical model for the aether, a medium that would support the electromagnetic waves that were becoming increasingly important to the explanation of radiative phenomena. Imaginative as were the "Baltimore lectures," they had little enduring value owing to the imminent demise of the mechanical world view.

In 1900, he gave a lecture titled Nineteenth-Century Clouds over the Dynamical Theory of Heat and Light. The two "dark clouds" he was alluding to were the unsatisfactory explanations that the physics of the time could give for two phenomena: the Michelson-Morley experiment and black body radiation. Two major physical theories were developed during the twentieth century starting from these issues: for the former, the Theory of relativity; for the second, quantum mechanics. Albert Einstein, in 1905, published the so-called "Annus Mirabilis Papers," one of which explained the photoelectric effect and was of the foundation papers of quantum mechanics, another of which described special relativity.

In 1907, Thomson's wife became ill, and her debilitating infirmity took a toll on Thomson's own health. He died December 17, 1907, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.

Other work

A variety of physical phenomena and concepts with which Thomson is associated are named Kelvin:

• Kelvin material
• Kelvin wave
• Kelvin-Helmholtz instability
• Kelvin-Helmholtz mechanism
• Kelvin-Helmholtz luminosity
• The SI unit of temperature, kelvin
• Kelvin transform in potential theory
• Kelvin's circulation theorem

Always active in industrial research and development, he was a Vice-President of the Kodak corporation.

Honors

• Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 1847.
  • Keith Medal, 1864.
  • Gunning Victoria Jubilee Prize, 1887.
  • President, 1873–1878, 1886–1890, 1895–1907.

• Fellow of the Royal Society, 1851.
  • Royal Medal, 1856.
  • Copley Medal, 1883.
  • President, 1890–1895.

• Knighted 1866.

• Baron Kelvin, of Largs in the County of Ayr, 1892. The title derives from the River Kelvin, which passes through the grounds of the University of Glasgow. His title died with him, as he was survived by neither heirs nor close relations.

• Knight Grand Cross of the Victorian Order, 1896.

• One of the first members of the Order of Merit, 1902.
• Privy Counsellor, 1902.

• He is buried in Westminster Abbey, London next to Isaac Newton.

Corporate name

The Kelvinator Corporation was founded in 1914 in Detroit, Michigan. This name was very suitable for a company that manufactured ice-boxes and domestic refrigerators.

See also

• Kelvin water dropper
• Kelvin sensing

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Asimov, Isaac. 1982. Asimov's Biographical Encyclopedia of Science and Technology, 2nd ed. New York: Doubleday. ISBN 0385177712.

• Ferguson, Pamela. 2002. World Book's Biographical Encyclopedia of Scientists, 8th ed. Chicago: World Book. ISBN 0716676001.

• Gillispie, Charles Coulston. 1975. Dictionary of Scientific Biography. New York: Scribner. ISBN 0684101211.

• Porter, Roy, and Marilyn Ogilvie, eds. 2000. The Biographical Dictionary of Scientists, 3rd ed. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0195216636.

• Von Meyer, Ernst. 1906. A History of Chemistry, tr. George McGowan. New York: The Macmillan Company.

Bibliography

Kelvin's works

• Hörz, H. Naturphilosophie als Heuristik?: Korrespondenz zwischen Hermann von Helmholtz und Lord Kelvin (William Thomson). Basilisken-Presse, 2000. ISBN 3925347569
• Thomson, W. Mathematical and Physical Papers. (6 vols) Cambridge University Press, 1882-1911. ISBN 0521054745
• Collected Papers in Physics and Engineering. Cambridge University Press, 1912. ISBN B0000EFOL8
• Thomson, W. & P.G. Tait. Treatise on Natural Philosophy. Oxford. 1867.
• Wilson, D.B. (ed.) The Correspondence Between Sir George Gabriel Stokes and Sir William Thomson, Baron Kelvin of Largs. (2 vols), Cambridge University Press, 1990. ISBN 0521328314

Biography, history of ideas and criticism

• Buchwald, J.Z., 1977. "William Thomson and the mathematization of Faraday's electrostatics." Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences 8: 101-136
• Burchfield, J.D. Lord Kelvin and the Age of the Earth. University of Chicago Press, 1990. ISBN 0226080439
• Cardoso Dias, D.M., 1996. "William Thomson and the Heritage of Caloric." Annals of Science 53: 511-520
• Chang, H. Inventing Temperature: Measurement and Scientific Progress. Oxford University Press, 2004. ISBN 0195171276
• Gooding, D., 1980. "Faraday, Thomson, and the concept of the magnetic field." British Journal of the History of Science 13: 91-120
• Gossick, B.R., 1976. "Heaviside and Kelvin: a study in contrasts." Annals of Science 33: 275-287
• Gray, A. Lord Kelvin: An Account of His Scientific Life and Work. 1908 London: J. M. Dent & Co.
• Green, G. & J.T. Lloyd. Kelvin's instruments and the Kelvin Museum. 1970. Glasgow: University of Glasgow. ISBN 0852610165
• Kargon, R.H. & Peter Achinstein (eds.) 1987. Kelvin's Baltimore Lectures and Modern Theoretical Physics; Historical and Philosophical Perspectives. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ISBN 0262111179
• King, A.G. 1925. Kelvin the Man. London: Hodder & Stoughton
• King, E.T. 1909. Lord Kelvin's Early Home. London: Macmillan
• Knudsen, O. 1972. "From Lord Kelvin's notebook: aether speculations." Centaurus 16: 41-53
• Lindley, D. Degrees Kelvin: A Tale of Genius, Invention and Tragedy. 2004. Joseph Henry Press. ISBN 0309090733
• McCartney, M. & A. Whitaker, (eds). Physicists of Ireland: Passion and Precision. 2002. Institute of Physics Publishing. ISBN 0750308664
• May, W.E. 1979. "Lord Kelvin and his compass." Journal of Navigation 32: 122-134
• Munro, J. 1891. Heroes of the Telegraph. London: Religious Tract Society
• Murray, D. 1924. Lord Kelvin as Professor in the Old College of Glasgow. Glasgow: Maclehose & Jackson.
• Russell, A. 1908. Lord Kelvin. London: Blackie.
• Sharlin, H.I. Lord Kelvin: The Dynamic Victorian. Pennsylvania State University Press, 1979. ISBN 0271002034
• Smith, C. & M.N. Wise. Energy and Empire: A Biographical Study of Lord Kelvin. Cambridge University Press, 1989. ISBN 0521261732
• Thompson, S.P. Life of William Thomson: Baron Kelvin of Largs. London: Macmillan, 1910.
• Tunbridge, P. Lord Kelvin: His Influence on Electrical Measurements and Units. London: Peter Peregrinus, 1992. ISBN 0863412378
• Wilson, D. 1910. William Thomson, Lord Kelvin: His Way of Teaching. Glasgow: John Smith & Son.
• Wilson, D.B. Kelvin and Stokes: A Comparative Study in Victorian Physics. Bristol: Hilger, 1987. ISBN 0852745265

External links

All links retrieved May 13, 2023.

• John Munro, Heroes of the Telegraph. project gutenberg.

Honorary Titles
Preceded by: Sir George Stokes	President of the Royal Society 1890–1895	Succeeded by: Sir Joseph Lister
Peerage of the United Kingdom
Preceded by: New Creation	Baron Kelvin 1892–1907	Succeeded by: Extinct

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