Thomson, William (1824-1907: Baron Kelvin of Largs, physicist)

A scientist and inventor, Lord Kelvin was born in Belfast, Ireland, in 1824, the second son of James Thomson (1786-1849) a professor of Mathematics in the Royal Institution there. The family moved to Glasgow, Scotland, in 1832. He matriculated at the university of Glasgow in 1834 and went on to Peterhouse, Cambridge where he helped to found Cambridge University Musical Society.

As a Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Glasgow (1846-1899), he gathered around him enthusiastic students of mathematical physics and devoted himself to developing the new doctrine propounded by Sadie Carnot in 1824 and by James Prescott Joule in 1847 that work and heat were convertible. Between 1851 and 1854 he formulated the two great laws of thermodynamics - of equivalence and of transformation - in communications to the Royal Society of Edinburgh and subsequently rounded off his work on thermodynamics by enunciating the doctrine of available energy.

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