Kelvin: the man behind the title

Although better known by the title he gained later in life, Lord Kelvin was born plain William Thomson in Belfast on 26 June 1824. Shortly afterwards his family moved to Scotland, where his father became a professor of mathematics at Glasgow University. Thomson attended his father's lectures from the age of seven, matriculated as a full-time student when he was 10, and by the age of 15 had published a paper on Fourier series. The young Thomson enrolled at Cambridge University in 1841, his father cautioning him against the dissipating influences of sport and entertainment. Despite much rowing on the River Cam and playing cornet in the music society, Thomson was acknowledged as easily the sharpest scientific mind of his year.

When Glasgow's incumbent professor of natural philosophy died in 1846, Thomson's father played hardball politics to parachute his son into the vacant post. Thomson took up the job at Glasgow at the age of just 22, whereupon he began an astonishingly successful career that would stretch more than half a century. Later, his brother James arrived as professor of engineering: the Thomsons became a scientific and academic dynasty.

Brother James, who had originally trained as an apprentice marine engineer, played an important role in Thomson's approach to science. In one letter, James recalls an afternoon in 1842 when he and William were standing beside a canal in Walsall watching water flowing into a lock to raise a barge. It was an apt demonstration of energy being converted into work, at a time when the brothers' ideas about energy and power were just forming. What fascinated them, however, was the energy that was lost when water uselessly splashed over the sides of the lock instead of helping lift the barge. Were there fundamental principles determining how efficiently energy could be put to use? This question would occupy Thomson over the next decades.

Guided by the experiments of James Joule and the work of Sadi Carnot, Thomson slowly came to grasp the fundamental nature of energy, heat and temperature. He seemed to have an infinite capacity for wrestling with the puzzles of nature and technology, famously declaring that no problem was outside the scope of science. He was knighted by Queen Victoria in 1866 for his part in designing sensitive instruments for the first transatlantic telecommunications system. Raised to the peerage in 1892, he took the name Lord Kelvin after the river that runs through the west end of Glasgow just past the university.

Kelvin's curiosity never diminished. Retiring as professor at Glasgow in 1899, he immediately signed himself up again as a research student. Even in the year of his death, eight years later, he published six research papers. Kelvin died at his home in Largs, Ayrshire on 17 December 1907 after a short illness. Carnot, Joule, and Clausius were already long gone: the death of William Thomson marked the final act in the first great era of the science of energy: thermodynamics.

Back to article