Baron William Thomson KelvinDied 17 Dec 1907 at age 83 (born 26 Jun 1824). Irish physicist, mathematician and engineer who became an influential physicist, who has been described as the Newton of his era. Born as William Thomson in Ireland. At Glasgow University, Scotland, he was a professor for over half a century. The name he made for himself was more than just a temperature scale. His activities ranged from being the brains behind the laying of a transatlantic telephone cable, to attempting to calculate the age of the earth from its rate of cooling. In 1892, when raised to the peerage as Baron Kelvin of Largs, he had chosen the name from the Kelvin River, near Glasgow. He is often described as a Scottish scientist because of his life career spent in Glasgow, but late in life, in a lecture in 1883, he referred to himself as an Irishman. |
