Kelvin, Lord (William Thomson) (1824-1907)

William Thomson, Baron Kelvin (1824-1907), was born in Belfast and raised and privately educated by his father, James Thomson in Glasgow. He studied mathematics at Cambridge University from 1841 and by 1845 had been appointed a fellow of Peterhouse and the editor of the Cambridge Mathematical Journal. He was elected to the chair of mathematics at Glasgow university in 1846, at the age of twenty-two. In 1851, he first enunciated what would be referred to as the canonical 'Kelvin' statement of the second law of thermodynamics. Thomson popularized the new concept of 'energy' to a wider audience with a short paper to the Philosophical Magazine . His most celebrated textual embodiment of the 'science of energy' was Thomson and Tait's Treatise on Natural Philosophy (1867) which reinterpreted Newton's Third Law (action-reaction) as conversation of energy, with action viewed as rate of working. Thomson's direct involvement in the development of the transatlantic telegraph brought him a knighthood.