Degrees Kelvin: A tale of genius, invention, and tragedy PDF
Preview Degrees Kelvin: A tale of genius, invention, and tragedy
David Lindley Joseph Henry Press Washington, D.C. Joseph Henry Press • 500 Fifth Street, N.W. • Washington, D.C. 20001 The Joseph Henry Press, an imprint of the National Academies Press, was created with the goal of making books on science, technology, and health more widely available to professionals and the public. Joseph Henry was one of the founders of the National Academy of Sciences and a leader in early American science. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this volume are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Academy of Sciences or its affiliated institutions. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lindley, David, 1956- Degrees Kelvin : a tale of genius, invention, and tragedy / David Lindley. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-309-09073-3 (hbk.) 1. Kelvin, William Thomson, Baron, 1824-1907. 2. Physicists—Great Britain—Biography. I. Title. QC16.K3L56 2004 530′.092—dc22 2003022885 Permission: The Syndics of Cambridge University Library in order to quote from the Kelvin and Stokes collections. Copyright 2004 by David Lindley. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. C ONTENTS Acknowledgments vii Introduction 1 1 Cambridge 11 2 Conundrums 64 3 Cable 114 4 Controversies 164 5 Compass 215 6 Kelvin 260 Epilogue 309 Bibliography 317 Notes 325 Index 353 v A CKNOWLEDGMENTS R esearch for this book was done mostly at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, especially the Radcliffe Science Library, and at Cam- bridge University Library. I am grateful to the staff at both insti- tutions for their help. I particularly thank Adam Perkins and his staff at the Scientific Manuscripts Collections at Cambridge. Last minute assis- tance from the Niels Bohr Library of the American Institute of Physics is much appreciated. My agent, Susan Rabiner, helped shape the story into a more pur- poseful tale than the amorphous mass it might otherwise have been. Jeff Robbins at the Joseph Henry Press encouraged me to untangle some knots in the original manuscript and professed to be not unduly dis- turbed that I didn’t quite make the deadline. Chris Butcher scanned and tweaked several of the images reproduced here. Robert Fairley kindly provided copies of Jemima Blackburn’s watercolor of the Thomson broth- ers and Helmholtz and the striking photograph of Kelvin as an elderly man. Thanks to all. For all kinds of other moral and practical support during a couple of peripatetic years, including but not limited to places to stay; rides to and from airports; use of the old blue Toyota; Internet connections; assorted computer peripherals plus technical assistance; beer, pizza, and bridge parties; bibliophilic companionship in Hay-on-Wye; excuses to go sight- vii viii Acknowledgments seeing; distracting e-mails and phone calls; and a variety of opportunities to think about something other than this book, my thanks go to Liz Pennisi and Matt Butcher, Hellen Gelband, Karen Hopkin, Stephen Lindley, Bob Shackleton and Cathy Mattingly, Christine Mlot, Damaris Christensen, and Kay Behrensmeyer and Bill Keyser. I want lastly to thank Michael Nauenberg for his review of the manu- script, which made me rethink some of my opinions, especially of ther- modynamic history. Professor Nauenberg and I still don’t entirely agree, but I hope our differences are honorable. The history of science is a branch of history, after all; definitive conclusions are hard to come by. I NTRODUCTION O n the morning of Wednesday, May 1, 1902, students at the University of Rochester in upstate New York assembled for chapel with untypical eagerness. Attendance, supposedly man- datory, was normally sparse. By a quarter past 10 on this day, however, students had crammed expectantly into Anderson Hall, alongside a good number of interested townspeople. The place was bursting. As senior faculty members filed in to take their seats, sporadic shouts and cheers erupted from the simmering throng. But when university president Dr. Rush Rhees at last entered, a hush came over the crowd. Leaning on Rhees’s arm was a slight elderly man, with thinning white hair above a prominent forehead, his face enlivened by sharp blue eyes. The visitor walked carefully, with a noticeable limp. He was more than usually frail this morning, suffering from a bout of the facial neuralgia that had af- flicted him intermittently for several years now. On rare occasions the pain was bad enough to keep him in bed for a few days. The New York Times, reporting his arrival from England on the Cunard ship Campania a week and a half earlier, noted that the old man “did not appear to be in robust health.” He had been helped into a chair on the dockside while customs officials inspected his baggage. But he managed a few words 1 2 Degrees Kelvin with reporters and would have spoken more had he been less tired. Throughout his long life he had rarely been ill, and immobility irked him. The best antidote for age and pain was to keep working, to stick to his busy schedule, and especially not to let anyone down. As Dr. Rhees and his venerable guest moved slowly to their places, the Rochester students rose to their feet in silence. But then, if we are to believe the reporter for the local Democrat and Chronicle, there “broke forth such a cheer as had never before resounded through Anderson Hall. It filled the college halls, overflowed out on the campus, and could have been heard half a mile away. It was a spontaneous, generous cheer, exu- berant, manly and vociferous, a cheer which must have warmed the visitor’s heart, much as he is accustomed to the homage of men.” The recipient of this extraordinary acclaim was not a war hero or a beloved author, not a theater star or a famous politician, but, remarkably, a scientist and a British scientist to boot. Every age has its venerated intellectuals, but rarely do they become the subject of whooping and foot stomping by crowds of university students. In this, as in so much, Lord Kelvin was one of a kind. At 77 years of age, he was no ivory-tower academic but a public figure and a celebrity on both sides of the Atlantic. A few days earlier he had attended a reception in New York for the new president of Columbia University, where he mingled with the likes of President Theodore Roosevelt and Andrew Carnegie. In Washington, D.C., he and Lady Kelvin stayed with Mr. and Mrs. George Westinghouse at their mansion on 16th Street which, heading directly north from the White House, was lined in those days with the magnifi- cent residences of the gilded age. At grand dinner parties on successive evenings, American politicians and foreign ambassadors, as well as tech- nical men such as Alexander Graham Bell, accepted invitations to meet the celebrated visitor. In Rochester he was the guest of George Eastman, founder of the Kodak company, of which Kelvin was a vice-president and scientific adviser. He eagerly inspected the hydroelectric power station at Niagara, which turned the energy of the cascading cataract into electric- ity. For a reportedly feeble old man, he swept around the northeastern United States during his three-week visit with remarkable energy and enthusiasm. Newspapers referred to him as a noted or eminent or distinguished INTRODUCTION 3 scientist, an appellation Kelvin disliked. He preferred the old-fashioned designation “natural philosopher.” Only in the last half century had sci- ence or natural philosophy emerged from its arcane and isolated realm to become a force in public life. Terminology had an awkward, unfamiliar air. On a trip to North America five years earlier, one newspaper talked of “Lord Kelvin, the eminent electrician.” In those days an electrician was not someone who came to your house to install a new outlet or fix a broken wire; the average home didn’t have such marvels. Rather, an elec- trician was one versed in the science of electricity and magnetism, natural phenomena that had only recently begun to yield to scientific under- standing and that still retained a good deal of mystery. Kelvin had indeed been a pioneer of the new science of electromagnetism, and of much else besides, but that could hardly account for his renown. The names of his equally meritorious contemporaries, men such as Faraday and Maxwell and Weber and Helmholtz, may have evoked a sliver of recognition among the nonscientific public. But these were not widely known names at the end of the 19th century, any more than they are today. Kelvin, on the other hand, was a genuine celebrity. After the raucous Rochester students had settled themselves, the usual chapel service followed. Then university president Rhees spoke of their distinguished guest. “Lord Kelvin’s visit,” he began, “has called to mind his many contributions to the practical applications of science to modern needs.” He mentioned the laying of the first transatlantic submarine tele- graph cables some 40 years earlier, an enterprise with which Kelvin had been crucially associated. Of particular concern to Rhees’s audience was Kelvin’s long-standing involvement in the development of systems to gen- erate electric power by tapping the enormous energy going to waste every second as water plunged endlessly over nearby Niagara Falls. He talked of Kelvin’s countless laboratory investigations, which underpinned the work of many pioneers of electrical science and technology. “His patient study and passion for exactness have put in his abiding debt all students who follow in the path of physical investigation in which he has been so illus- trious a leader.” These achievements, Rhees was careful to note, sprang from the mind of a man who was not simply an inventor but one whose prime achieve- ments lay in the realm of pure science. He mentioned the doctrine of the
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