William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin

His brother James Thomson was 2 years older than him and also studied at the ‘Glasgow University’. James Thomson is a scientist and engineer of great renown in his own right. He was made a Fellow of The Royal Society in 1877.

In the September of 1952, Thomson married his friend of many years and the daughter of Walter Crum, Margaret Crum however his wife suffered from health problems and that was one something that bothered him immensely. He had no children.

On 7th December, 1907 at the age of 83, William Thomson, First Baron Kelvin died after suffering from common cold for more than a month.

William Thomson was born on 26 June, 1824 to James Thomson and Margaret Thomson in Belfast, Ireland. He was the 4th child born to the Thomsons’ and showed a gift for the sciences quite early on in his life.

His father James was a mathematics teacher and William Thomson was initially home schooled. In 1834, at the age of 10, he started studying at ‘Glasgow University’; the institute provided elementary school education to willing pupils at the time.

In the year 1841, William Thomson went up to ‘Peterhouse College’ at ‘Cambridge University’ and studied mathematics, physics and pure sciences. He was also an eager sportsman while at Cambridge and in fact was a well-known athlete.

Right from his days at Cambridge, William Thomson was known as a scientist of rare talent and in 1851 he published a paper in relation to Joule’s and Carnot’s theories on thermodynamics that was the touchstone of the ‘Second Law of Thermodynamics’.

Between the years 1852 and 1856, he partnered with James Prescott Joule and analyzed the experiments on thermodynamics carried out by the latter. Their collaboration led to plenty of discoveries in thermodynamics including the celebrated ‘Joule-Thomson Effect’.

In 1855, Sir William worked with the leading scientist of the period Michael Faraday on the transatlantic telegraph cable and the duo were also responsible for being the first to propound the concept of the electromagnetic field.

He was one of the earliest scientists to have devised a method of accurately measuring electric current and in 1857 he published a paper on the electrometer. He went on to invent the ‘Kelvin Balance’, which was regarded as one of the most accurate measure of the period.

He worked in two separate periods for the Atlantic cable company; between the years 1857 to 1866. He was involved in the process of laying the cables that would bring about a paradigm shift in how people communicated.

Sir William Thomson’s work on the transatlantic cable remains his biggest legacy that laid the foundations for modern communication technology and it later became one of the bedrocks of communication during the World War.

He was pioneer on thermodynamics studies and in 1848 was successful in establishing the correct value of ‘Absolute Zero’, which is the lower limit of temperature. The scale calibrated to measure temperatures is known as the Kelvin scale after him.