Erik Visits a (Non) American Grave, Part 2,093

This is the grave of William Thomson, Lord Kelvin.

Born in 1824 in Belfast, Occupied Ireland, William Thomson grew up wealthy. His father taught math and engineering at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution. The family were old colonizers of Northern Ireland. In 1832, his father was named a professor at the University of Glasgow, so they moved to Scotland, where Thomson would grow up, tutored by his father to also be an engineer. Wealthy, they were sure to spend time in London and Paris to give the kids access to high culture and connections. He was a smart kid anyway. He started college at Glasgow in 1834, but it was normal for reasonably smart kids to start college early at that time and in any case, it’s just such a different world than today. In any case, he did well not only in science and engineering but in the humanities. He won a prize in 1836 for a Greek translation into English. His first major scientific contribution was a paper called “Essay on the Figure of Earth” and even there, he started it with an Alexander Pope poem.

It didn’t take long for Thomson to start on a successful scientific career. He started writing papers defending Joseph Fourier’s analytical theory of heat, then controversial, and got them published. Electricity became a particular interest of his. This all gets over my head pretty quickly, but suffice it to say that he became a leader in the field. He was close to Michael Faraday, who would be inspired by Thomson’s writings and personal support to discover the Faraday effect that connected light and magnetics.

Of course what Thomson became most famous for is being named for a measurement of heat. It’s not really used today, not much. Maybe scientists use it, I don’t really know. But people know that there’s fahrenheit, there’s celsius, and then there’s kelvin. Thomson himself didn’t really discover much of this. The absolute low temperature of -459 fahrenheit was already known before he came along. But the scientific community named the units of absolute temperature after him.

Thomson became an institution at his home institution, the University of Glasgow. Hired to teach science there, he stayed for the next 53 years. He was a critical early figure in the field of physics, really just developing at this time. He was especially important in developing the first and second laws of thermodynamics.

Thomson was no university-only scientist though. Like most scientists, he liked money and wanted to make it when he could. This was the era of telegraph and he did a lot of work to improve it, patenting a lot of inventions around it. He was key to the development of the transatlantic telegraph. This actually came out of a fallow period in Thomson’s career. He had married but his wife was sickly. He would spend a lot of time over the next nearly two decades taking care of her until she died. Early on, he wasn’t really doing any work because of this. So George Gabriel Stokes recruited him to the underwater cable project, partly as a way to get him working again and partly because he was the right man for the job. Faraday was already working on this.

There were limitations on how many messages such a cable could send. Thomson dedicated himself to expanding these possibilities. He strongly urged more investment in a better cable, telling everyone involved it would pay off in a major way with the profitability, even if it required greater risk upfront. He was of course correct about this. Others took Thomson’s calculations around this and said he was saying that the cable could not be built at any reasonable economic cost, but that’s not what he was saying and he pushed back hard on this.

Thomson then followed the ship that laid the cable into the Atlantic, as he was the one involved who had fewer problems with sea-sickness. He did so to keep running experiments and figuring out how to make it better. The answer proved to be the introduction of copper wiring, which as we all know remains critical to communication wires to the present. He developed the galvanometer, which senses electric current through deflecting a light beam off a mirror, and the siphon recorder, which was used as a receiver for the cable, on this trip. He would patent those and make a lot money too.

Through all of this, he was competing with Wildman Whitehouse, the engineer technically in charge. Whitehouse did not like Thomson and constantly stated that he had bad ideas, but in the end, Thomson was right on almost all fronts and after Whitehouse’s ideas failed, Thomson’s were used instead to much greater success. In later years, laying transatlantic cables was a big part of his career. He kept studying the issue and they kept improving.

Thomson was was knighted by Queen Victoria in 1866. He didn’t become Lord Kelvin until 1892, reaching full nobility. This had as much to do as his hatred of anything to do with Irish self-rule as it did his scientific achievements. The name came from the River Kelvin that goes through Glasgow near the university. But he was very much a conservative Protestant from Northern Ireland when it came to anything to do with the Emerald Isle.

It took until 1899 for anyone to get Kelvin out of Glasgow. He turned down tons of offers from both universities and corporations, but that year, George Eastman offered him the position of vice-chair of the board for Kodak’s British company. He took that, but he returned to Glasgow in 1904 as chancellor.

Kelvin may also have had the only permanent curling injury in history. He was a big fan of the game and in 1861, he was playing it. Evidently, curling shoes weren’t the fancy sliding ones you see in the Olympics today. He fell on the ice and busted his leg. He walked with a limp the rest of his life, which became something of a signature look for him. All of his time on the sea made him love it. His wife died in 1870 and after that, he devoted himself heavily to sailing, buying a big schooner that used for both his scientific interests and for entertaining. He was a very rich man by this time. He remarried when working on a cable issue in Madeira, when he met a significantly younger woman, though 13 years isn’t that out of control given that he was 50.

In 1907, Kelvin died, mostly of just being old. He caught a chill, couldn’t recover, and finally died. He was 83 years old.

I know that Thomson made other contributions to science as well, but rather than butcher them, we can leave them to comments.

William Thomson, Lord Kelvin is buried in Westminster Abbey, London, England.

If you would like this series to visit American scientists, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. John Bardeen is in Madison, Wisconsin and Grace Harper is in Arlington. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.