Lord Kelvin Part 1

Lord Kelvin.

by Andrew Gray.

PREFACE

This book makes no claim to be a biography of Lord Kelvin in the usual sense. It is an extension of an article which appeared in the _Glasgow Herald_ for December 19, 1907, and has been written at the suggestion of various friends of Lord Kelvin, in the University of Glasgow and elsewhere, who had read that article. The aim of the volume is to give an account of Lord Kelvin's life of scientific activity, and to explain to the student, and to the general reader who takes an interest in physical science and its applications, the nature of his discoveries.

Only such a statement of biographical facts as seems in harmony with this purpose is attempted. But I have ventured, as an old pupil and a.s.sistant of Lord Kelvin, to sketch here and there the scene in his cla.s.s-room and laboratory, and to record some of the incidents of his teaching and work.

I am under obligations to the proprietors of the _Glasgow Herald_ for their freely accorded permission to make use of their article, and to Messrs. Annan, photographers, Glasgow, and Messrs. James MacLehose & Sons, Glasgow, for the ill.u.s.trations which are given, and which I hope may add to the interest of the book.

A. GRAY.

_The University_, _Glasgow_, _May_ 20, 1908.

CHAPTER I

PARENTAGE AND EARLY EDUCATION

Lord Kelvin came of a stock which has helped to give to the north of Ireland its commercial and industrial supremacy over the rest of that distressful country. His ancestors were county Down agriculturists of Scottish extraction. His father was James Thomson, the well-known Glasgow Professor of Mathematics, and author of mathematical text-books which at one time were much valued, and are even now worth consulting.

James Thomson was born on November 13, 1786, near Ballynahinch, county Down. Being the son of a small farmer he was probably unable to enter on university studies at the usual age, for he did not matriculate in Scotland until 1810. The cla.s.s-lists of the time show that he distinguished himself highly in mathematics, natural philosophy, and cla.s.sics.

An interesting incident of these student days of his father was related by Lord Kelvin in his installation address as Chancellor of the University in 1904, and is noteworthy as indicating how comparatively recent are many of the characteristics of our present-day life and commerce. James Thomson and some companions, walking from Greenock to Glasgow, on their way to join the college cla.s.ses at the commencement of the session, "saw a prodigy--a black chimney moving rapidly beyond a field on the left-hand side of their road. They jumped the fence, ran across the field, and saw, to their astonishment, Henry Bell's 'Comet'

(then not a year old) travelling on the Clyde between Glasgow and Greenock."[1] Sometimes then the pa.s.sage from Belfast to Greenock took a long time. Once James Thomson, crossing in an old lime-carrying smack, was three or four days on the way, in the course of which the vessel, becalmed, was carried three times by the tide round Ailsa Craig.

Mr. Thomson was elected in 1815 to the Professors.h.i.+p of Mathematics in the Royal Academical Inst.i.tution of Belfast, and held the post for seventeen years, building up for himself an excellent reputation as a teacher, and as a clear and accurate writer. Just then a.n.a.lytical methods were beginning to supersede the processes of geometrical demonstration which the form adopted by Newton for the Principia had tended to perpetuate in this country. Laplace was at the height of his fame in France, and was writing the great a.n.a.lytical Principia, his _Mecanique Celeste_, applying the whole force of his genius, and all the resources of the differential and integral calculus invented by Newton and improved by the mathematicians of the intervening century, to the elucidation and extension of the "system of the world," which had been so boldly sketched by the founder of modern physical science.

In that period Fourier wrote his memoirs on the conduction of heat, and gave to the world his immortal book to be an inspiration to the physical philosophers of succeeding generations. Legendre had written memoirs which were to lead, in the hands of Jacobi and his successors, to a new province of mathematics, while, in Germany, Gauss had begun his stately march of discovery.

The methods and results of this period of mathematical activity were at first hardly known in this country: the slavish devotion of Cambridge to the geometrical processes and the fluxional notation of Newton, an exclusive partiality which Newton himself would have been the first to condemn, led a.n.a.lytical methods, equally Newtonian, to be stigmatised as innovations, because clothed in the unfamiliar garb of the continental notation. A revolt against this was led by Sir John Herschel, Woodhouse, Peac.o.c.k, and some others at Cambridge, who wrote books which had a great effect in bringing about a change of methods. Sir John thus described the effect of the new movements:--"Students at our universities, fettered by no prejudices, entangled by no habits, and excited by the ardour and emulation of youth, had heard of the existence of ma.s.ses of knowledge from which they were debarred by the mere accident of position. They required no more. The prestige which magnifies what is unknown, and the attractions inherent in what is forbidden, coincided in their impulse. The books were procured and read, and produced their natural effects. The brows of many a Cambridge examiner were elevated, half in ire, half in admiration, at the unusual answers which began to appear in examination papers. Even moderators are not made of impenetrable stuff, though fenced with sevenfold Jacquier, and tough bull-hide of Vince and Wood."

The memoirs and treatises of the continental a.n.a.lysts were eagerly procured and studied by James Thomson, and as he was bound by no examination traditions, he freely adopted their methods, so far as these came within the scope of his teaching, and made them known to the English reading public in his text-books. Hence when the chair of Mathematics at Glasgow became vacant in 1832 by the death of Mr. James Millar, Mr. Thomson was at once chosen by the Faculty, which at that time was the electing body.

The Faculty consisted of the Princ.i.p.al and the Professors of Divinity, Church History, Oriental Languages, Natural Philosophy, Moral Philosophy, Mathematics, Logic, Greek, Humanity, Civil Law, Practice of Medicine, Anatomy, and Practical Astronomy. It administered the whole revenues and property of the College, and possessed the patronage of the above-named chairs with the exception of Church History, Civil Law, Medicine, Anatomy, and Astronomy, so that Mr. Thomson became not only Professor of Mathematics, but also, in virtue of his office, a member of what was really the supreme governing body of the University. The members of the Faculty, with the exception of the Professor of Astronomy, who resided at the observatory, were provided with official residences in the College. This arrangement is still adhered to; though now the government is in the hands of a University Court, with the Senate (which formerly only met to confer degrees or to manage the library and some other matters) to regulate and superintend teaching and discipline.

Professor Thomson was by no means the first or the only professor of the name in the University of Glasgow, as the following pa.s.sage quoted from a letter of John Nichol, son of Dr. J. P. Nichol, and first Professor of English at Glasgow, amusingly testifies:--

"Niebuhr, after examining a portion of the _Fasti Consulares_, arrived at the conclusion that the _senatus populusque Roma.n.u.s_ had made a compact to elect every year a member of the Fabian house to one of the highest offices of state, so thickly are the records studded with the name of the Fabii. Some future Niebuhr of the New Zealand Macaulay imagines, turning his attention to the annals of Glasgow College, will undoubtedly arrive at the conclusion that the leaders of that ill.u.s.trious corporation had, during the period of which I am writing, become bound in a similar manner to the name of Thomson. Members of that great gens filled one-half of the chairs in the University. I will not venture to say how many I have known. There was Tommy Thomson the chemist; William Thomson of Materia Medica; Allen Thomson of Anatomy, brother of the last; Dr. James Thomson of Mathematics; William, his son, etc., etc. Old Dr. James was one of the best of Irishmen, a good mathematician, an enthusiastic and successful teacher, the author of several valuable school-books, a friend of my father's, and himself the father of a large family, the members of which have been prosperous in the world. They lived near us in the court, and we made a pretty close acquaintances.h.i.+p with them all."

A former Professor of Natural Philosophy, Dr. Anderson,[2] who appears to have lived the closing years of his life in almost constant warfare with his colleagues of the Faculty, and who established science cla.s.ses for workmen in Glasgow, bequeathed a sum of money to set up a college in Glasgow in which such cla.s.ses might be carried on. The result was the foundation of what used to be called the "Andersonian University" in George Street, the precursor of the magnificent Technical College of the present day. This name, and the large number of Thomsons who had been and were still connected with the University of Glasgow, caused the more ancient inst.i.tution to be not infrequently referred to as the "Thomsonian University"!

The Thomas Thomson (no relative of the Belfast Thomsons) affectionately, if a little irreverently, mentioned in the above quotation, was then the Professor of Chemistry. He was the first to establish a chemical laboratory for students in this country; indeed, his laboratory preceded that of Liebig at Giessen by some years, and it is probable that as regards experimental chemistry Glasgow was then in advance of the rest of the world. His pupil and life-long admirer was destined to establish the first physical laboratory for such students as were willing to spend some time in the experimental investigation and verification of physical principles, or to help the professor in his researches. The systematic instruction of students in methods of experimenting by practical exercises with apparatus was a much later idea, and this fact must be taken account of when the laboratories of the present time are contrasted with the much more meagre provision of those early days. The laboratory is now, as much as the lecture-room, the place where cla.s.ses are held and instruction given in experimental science to crowds of students, and it is a change for the better.

The arrival of James Thomson and his family at Glasgow College, in 1832, was remarked at the time as an event which brought a large reinforcement to the gens already inseparably a.s.sociated with the place: how great were to be its consequences not merely to the University but to the world at large n.o.body can then have imagined. His family consisted of four sons and two daughters: his wife, Margaret Gardner, daughter of William Gardner, a merchant in Glasgow, had died shortly before, and the care of the family was undertaken by her sister, Mrs. Gall. The eldest son, James Thomson, long after to be Rankine's successor in the Chair of Engineering, was ten years of age and even then an inveterate inventor; William, the future Lord Kelvin (born June 26, 1824), was a child of eight. Two younger sons were John (born in 1826)--who achieved distinction in Medicine, became Resident a.s.sistant in the Glasgow Royal Infirmary, and died there of a fever caught in the discharge of his duty--and Robert, who was born in 1829, and died in Australia in 1905.

Besides these four sons there were in all three daughters:--Elizabeth, afterwards wife of the Rev. David King, D.D.; Anna, who was married to Mr. William Bottomley of Belfast (these two were the eldest of the family), and Margaret, the youngest, who died in childhood. Thus began William Thomson's residence in and connection with the University of Glasgow, a connection only terminated by the funeral ceremony in Westminster Abbey on December 23, 1907.

Professor Thomson himself carefully superintended the education of his sons, which was carried out at home. They were well grounded in the old cla.s.sical languages, and moreover received sound instruction in what even now are called, but in a somewhat disparaging sense, modern subjects. As John Nichol has said in his letters, "He was a stern disciplinarian, and did not relax his discipline when he applied it to his children, and yet the aim of his life was their advancement."

It would appear from John Nichol's recollections that even in childhood and youth, young James Thomson was an enthusiastic experimentalist and inventor, eager to describe his ideas and show his models to a sympathetic listener.[3] And both then and in later years his charming simplicity, his devouring pa.s.sion for accuracy of verbal expression in all his scientific writing and teaching, and his unaffected and unconscious genius for the invention of mechanical appliances, all based on true and intuitively perceived physical principles, showed that if he had had the unrelenting power of ignoring accessories and unimportant details which was possessed by his younger brother, he might have accomplished far more than he did, considerable as that was. But William had more rapid decision, and though careful and exact in expressing his meaning, was less influenced by considerations of the errors that might arise from the various connotations of such scientific terms as are also words in common use; and he quickly completed work which his brother would have pondered over for a long time, and perhaps never finished.

It is difficult for a stranger to Glasgow, or even for a resident in Glasgow in these days of quick and frequent communication with England, and for that matter with all parts of the world, to form a true idea of life and work at the University of Glasgow seventy years ago. The University had then its home in the old "tounis colledge" in the High Street, where many could have wished it to remain, and, extending its buildings on College Green, retain the old and include the new. Its fine old gateway, and part of one of the courts, were still a quaint adornment of the somewhat squalid street in 1871, after the University had moved to its present situation on the windy top of Gilmorehill.

Deserted as it was, its old walls told something of the history of the past, and reminded the pa.s.ser-by that learning had flourished amid the shops and booths of the townspeople, and that students and professors had there lived and worked within sound of the shuttle and the forge.

The old a.s.sociations of a town or a street or a building, linked as they often are with the history of a nation, are a valuable possession, not always placed in the account when the advantages or disadvantages of proposed changes are discussed; but a University which for four hundred years has seen the tide of human life flow round it in a great city, is instinct with memories which even the demolition of its walls can only partially destroy. Poets and statesmen, men of thought and men of action, lords and commoners, rich men's sons and the children of farmers, craftsmen and labourers, had mingled in its cla.s.ses and sat together on its benches; and so had been brought about a community of thought and feeling which the practice of our modern and wealthy cosmopolites, who affect to despise nationality, certainly does nothing to encourage. In the eighteenth century the Provosts and the Bailies of the time still dwelt among men and women in the High Street, and its continuation the Saltmarket, or not far off in Virginia Street, the home of the tobacco lords and the West India merchants. Their homely hospitality, their cautious and at the same time splendid generosity, their prudent courage, and their faithful and candid friends.h.i.+ps are depicted in the pages of Scott; and though a change in men and manners, not altogether for the better, has been gradually brought about by sport and fas.h.i.+on, those peculiarly Scottish virtues are still to be found in the civic statesmen and merchant princes of the Glasgow of to-day.

Seventy years ago the great migration of the well-to-do towards the west had commenced, but it had but little interfered with the life of the High Street or of the College. Now many old slums besides the Vennel and the Havannah have disappeared, much to the credit of the Corporation of Glasgow; and, alas, so has every vestige of the Old College, much to the regret of all who remember its quaint old courts. A railway company, it is to be supposed, dare not possess an artistic soul to be saved; and therefore, perhaps, it is that it builds huge and ugly caravanserais of which no one, except perhaps the shareholders, would keenly regret the disappearance. But both artists and antiquaries would have blessed the directors--and such a blessing would have done them no harm--if they had been ingenious and pious enough to leave some relic of the old buildings as a memorial of the old days and the old life of the High Street.

A picture of the College in the High Street has recently been drawn by one who lived and worked in it, though some thirty years after James Thomson brought his family to live in its courts. Professor G. G. Ramsay has thus portrayed some features of the place, which may interest those who would like to imagine the environment in which Lord Kelvin grew up from childhood, until, a youth of seventeen, he left Glasgow for Cambridge.[4] "There was something in the very disamenities of the old place that created a bond of fellows.h.i.+p among those who lived and worked there, and that makes all old students, to this day, look back to it with a sort of family pride and reverence. The grimy, dingy, low-roofed rooms; the narrow, picturesque courts, buzzing with student-life; the dismal, foggy mornings and the perpetual gas; the sudden pa.s.sage from the brawling, huckstering High Street into the academic quietude, or the still more academic hubbub, of those quaint cloisters, into which the policeman, so busy outside, was never permitted to penetrate; the tinkling of the 'angry bell' that made the students hurry along to the door which was closed the moment that it stopped; the roar and the flare of the Sat.u.r.day nights, with the cries of carouse or incipient murder which would rise into our quiet rooms from the Vennel or the Havannah; the exhausted la.s.situde of Sunday mornings, when poor slipshod creatures might be seen, as soon as the street was clear of churchgoers, sneaking over to the chemist's for a dose of laudanum to ease off the debauch of yesterday; the conversations one would have after breakfast with the old ladies on the other side of the Vennel, not twenty feet from one's breakfast-table, who divided the day between smoking short cutty pipes and drinking poisonous black tea--these sharp contrasts bound together the College folk and the College students, making them feel at once part of the veritable populace of the city, and also hedged off from it by separate pursuits and interests."

The university removed in 1871 to larger and more airily situated buildings in the western part of the city. Round these have grown up, in the intervening thirty-eight years, new buildings for most of the great departments of science, including a separate Inst.i.tute of Natural Philosophy, which was opened in April 1907, by the Prince and Princess of Wales.

CHAPTER II

CLa.s.sES AT THE UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW. FIRST SCIENTIFIC PAPERS

In 1834, that is at the age of ten, William Thomson entered the University cla.s.ses. Though small in stature, and youthful even for a time when mere boys were University students, he soon made himself conspicuous by his readiness in answering questions, and by his general proficiency, especially in mathematical and physical studies. The cla.s.ses met at that time twice a day--in mathematics once for lecture and once for oral examination and the working of unseen examples by students of the cla.s.s. It is still matter of tradition how, in his father's cla.s.s, William was conspicuous for the brilliancy of the work he did in this second hour. His elder brother James and he seem to have gone through their University course together. In 1834-5 they were bracketed third in Latin Prose Composition. In 1835-6 William received a prize for a vacation exercise--a translation of Lucian's _Dialogues of the G.o.ds_ "with full parsing of the first three Dialogues." In 1836-7 and 1837-8 the brothers were in the Junior and Senior Mathematical Cla.s.ses, and in each year the first and the second place in the prize-list fell to William and James respectively. In the second of these years, William appears as second prizeman in the Logic Cla.s.s, while James was third, and John Caird (afterwards Princ.i.p.al of the University) was fifth. William and James Thomson took the first and second prizes in the Natural Philosophy Cla.s.s at the close of session 1838-9; and in that year William gained the Cla.s.s Prize in Astronomy, and a University Medal for an Essay on the Figure of the Earth. In 1840-1 he appears once more, this time as fifth prizeman in the Senior Humanity Cla.s.s.

In his inaugural address as Chancellor of the University, already quoted above, Lord Kelvin refers to his teachers in Glasgow College in the following words:

"To this day I look back to William Ramsay's lectures on Roman Antiquities, and readings of Juvenal and Plautus, as more interesting than many a good stage play that I have seen in the theatre....

"Greek under Sir Daniel Sandford and Lus.h.i.+ngton, Logic under Robert Buchanan, Moral Philosophy under William Fleming, Natural Philosophy and Astronomy under John Pringle Nichol, Chemistry under Thomas Thomson, a very advanced teacher and investigator, Natural History under William Cowper, were, as I can testify by my experience, all made interesting and valuable to the students of Glasgow University in the thirties and forties of the nineteenth century....

"My predecessor in the Natural Philosophy chair, Dr. Meikleham, taught his students reverence for the great French mathematicians Legendre, Lagrange, and Laplace. His immediate successor in the teaching of the Natural Philosophy Cla.s.s,[5] Dr. Nichol, added Fresnel and Fourier to this list of scientific n.o.bles: and by his own inspiring enthusiasm for the great French school of mathematical physics, continually manifested in his experimental and theoretical teaching of the wave theory of light and of practical astronomy, he largely promoted scientific study and thorough appreciation of science in the University of Glasgow....

"As far back as 1818 to 1830 Thomas Thomson, the first Professor of Chemistry in the University of Glasgow, began the systematic teaching of practical chemistry to students, and, aided by the Faculty of Glasgow College, which gave the site and the money for the building, realised a well-equipped laboratory, which preceded, I believe, by some years Liebig's famous laboratory of Giessen, and was, I believe, the first established of all the laboratories in the world for chemical research and the practical instruction of University students in chemistry. That was at a time when an imperfectly informed public used to regard the University of Glasgow as a stagnant survival of mediaevalism, and used to call its professors the 'Monks of the Molendinar'!

"The University of Adam Smith, James Watt, and Thomas Reid was never stagnant. For two centuries and a half it has been very progressive.

Nearly two centuries ago it had a laboratory of human anatomy.

Seventy-five years ago it had the first chemical students' laboratory.

Sixty-five years ago it had the first Professors.h.i.+p of Engineering of the British Empire. Fifty years ago it had the first physical students'

laboratory--a deserted wine-cellar of an old professorial house, enlarged a few years later by the annexation of a deserted examination-room. Thirty-four years ago, when it migrated from its four-hundred-years-old site off the High Street of Glasgow to this brighter and airier hill-top, it acquired laboratories of physiology and zoology; but too small and too meagrely equipped."

In the summer of 1840 Professor James Thomson and his two sons went for a tour in Germany. It was stipulated that German should be the chief, if not the only, subject of study during the holidays. But William had just begun to study Fourier's famous book, _La Theorie a.n.a.lytique de la Chaleur_, and took it with him. He read that great work, full as it was of new theorems and processes of mathematics, with the greatest delight, and finished it in a fortnight. The result was his first original paper "On Fourier's Expansions of Functions in Trigonometrical Series," which is dated "Frankfort, July 1840, and Glasgow, April 1841," and was published in the _Cambridge Mathematical Journal_ (vol. ii, May 1841).

The object of the paper is to show in what cases a function f(x), which is to have certain arbitrary values between certain values of x, can be expanded in a series of sines and when in a series of cosines. The conclusion come to is that, for a.s.signed limits of x, between 0 and a, say, and for the a.s.signed values of the function, f(x) can be expressed either as a series of sines or as a series of cosines. If, however, the function is to be calculated for any value of x, which lies outside the limits of that variable between which the values of the function are a.s.signed, the values of f(x) there are to be found from the expansion adopted, by rules which are laid down in the paper.

Fourier used sine-expansions or cosine-expansions as it suited him for the function between the limits, and his results had been p.r.o.nounced to be "nearly all erroneous." From this charge of error, which was brought by a distinguished and experienced mathematician, the young a.n.a.lyst of sixteen successfully vindicated Fourier's work. Fourier was incontestably right in holding, though he nowhere directly proved, that a function given for any value of x between certain limits, could be expressed either by a sine-series or by a cosine-series. The divergence of the values of the two expressions takes place outside these limits, as has been stated above.

The next paper is of the same final date, but appeared in the _Cambridge Mathematical Journal_ of the following November. In his treatment of the problem of the cooling of a sphere, given with an arbitrary initial distribution of temperature symmetrical about the centre, Fourier a.s.sumes that the arbitrary function F(x), which expresses the temperature at distance x from the centre, can be expanded in an infinite series of the form