The basic biographical source for Kelvin is the two-volume work by Sylvanus P. Thompson, published in 1910. Concerning this, R. J. Strutt (p. 422, note to p. 253) recounts an amusing tale told to him by George Forbes, who among other things reported the Baltimore lectures for Nature: “At the British Association at York [in 1881], Thompson covered the blackboard with a mathematical calculation which did not commend itself to Lord Kelvin. The latter, as a protest, as soon as it was finished, silently took a duster and wiped it all out! Forbes many years afterwards reminded Thompson of the incident and said he thought it very generous of him to have written so laudatory a biography of Lord Kelvin. Thompson indicated that he attached no importance to it, that he had never given it another thought.”

Thompson’s life of Kelvin is, at any rate, not at all critical but is filled with detail, most of which stands up when compared to information from other sources. Thompson emphasizes Kelvin’s science rather than his technological work, and writing as a physicist at the beginning of the 20th century, he naturally cannot judge a number of scientific issues that were unresolved at the time.

The memoirs by Kelvin’s nieces Elizabeth Thomson King and Agnes

Gardner King overlap a good deal with each other and with Thompson but add interesting perspectives on Kelvin’s youth and daily life. (Thompson evidently obtained most of his account of Kelvin’s childhood and family background from the nieces.) Elizabeth’s book is mainly her edited account of the recollections of her mother Elizabeth, Kelvin’s sister, along with her own thoughts and memories. By remarkable coincidence, my copy of her book is dedicated by George King, presumably the brother of Elizabeth T. and Agnes G., to Captain John Gibb “in recollection of a delightful voyage in R.M.S. Makura [I think], Sydney to Vancouver, 28 Augt to 19 Sept 1911.” Captain Gibb, sad to report, never read it. I bought it (on the Internet) from a used-book store in Sydney, Australia, and when it arrived I found its pages entirely uncut.

A more recent scholarly account of Kelvin is the book by Crosbie Smith and M. Norton Wise. This is a thorough but, to me anyway, excessively ideological work. Smith and Wise deconstruct Kelvin’s science in a painstaking and mostly convincing way, but everything they find they fit into a sociopolitical straitjacket. They are enamored of a model of science couched in the terminology of economics. A discovery or idea has value in the scientific community according to the extent to which other scientists buy it. By generating consistently saleable products, a scientist can boost his intellectual credit rating. A winning theory outsells competing ideas and corners its market sector. Or something of the sort. Of course, Kelvin is then an accomplished scientific capitalist as well as an old-fashioned money-making one. How clever!

This sociological approach tends to strip individual scientists of originality or idiosyncrasy or psychology, turning them into anonymous actors responding helplessly to social forces. No doubt scientists are creatures of their times, but then so are historians of science, unless they claim a special exemption. Regardless of all that, I have tried to tell Kelvin’s story as the saga of a man equipped with a particular set of talents and a particular cast of mind. Where these things come from I don’t pretend to know.

The hardest part of researching this book was untangling the origins of thermodynamics. Scientific progress in any area tends to be a steady refinement of qualitative ideas into analytical laws, but in thermodynamics this journey was unusually tortuous, with the result that the academic

literature today contains many discrepant opinions on what the several pioneers of the subject said, what they thought they were saying, and how important their contributions were. I found no single account that provided a thorough and measured estimation of the whole subject. Of particular note is Clifford Truesdell’s exceedingly strange book, The Tragicomical History of Thermodynamics. Truesdell is bombastic, judgmental, and sesquipedalian, and a terrible scold to boot. He writes in a constant state of exasperated wonderment that men such as Carnot, Joule, Kelvin, Clausius, and Rankine were unable to see clearly all the things that are so apparent to him. He takes the line that no law is a good law until it has been given rigorous mathematical expression and for this reason tends to underestimate the value and difficulty of coming up with new physical concepts. His judgments as a result are idiosyncratic and questionable, but his detailed dissection of the many papers contributing to the foundation of thermodynamics is nonetheless illuminating.

In addition to the works cited here, I gleaned numerous odds and ends of information, too many and too minor to merit individual reference, from scanning the Reports of the British Association, the Philosophical Magazine, and Nature.

Celebration of Jubilee of Lord Kelvin, 15th, 16th and 17th June, 1896. 1896. Glasgow: MacLehose.

Kelvin Centenary: Oration and Addresses Commemorative. 1924. London: P. L. Humphries.

The New Amphion: Being the Book of the Edinburgh University Union Fancy Fair. 1886. Edinburgh: T. & A. Constable.

The North Atlantic Telegraph via the Faröe Isles, Iceland, and Greenland: Miscellaneous Reports, Speeches, and Papers on the Practicability of the Proposed North Atlantic Telegraph: The Results of the Surveying Expedition of 1859. 1861. London: Edw. Stanford.

The Practical Applications of Electricity: A Series of Lectures Delivered at the Institution of Civil Engineers. 1884. London: Institution of Civil Engineers.

Verses by M. T. 1874. Glasgow: Maclehose and Macdougall. (These are Margaret Thomson’s poems, published posthumously and without explicit identification of the author.)

Babbage, C. 1971. Reflections on the Decline of Science in England and on Some of Its Causes. Shannon, Ireland: Irish University Press. Reprint of the original 1830 edition.

Bacon, R. H. 1929. The Life of Lord Fisher of Kilverstone. 2 vols. London: Hodder and Stoughton.

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Bottomley, J. T. 1872. Physical Science in the University of Glasgow. Nature 6:29-32.

———. 1882. Scientific Worthies XX: James Joule. Nature 26:617-619.

Brett, J. W. 1858. Brett’s Submarine Telegraph. London: Author.

Bright, C. 1889. Submarine Telegraphs: Their History, Construction, and Working. London: Crosby Lockwood & Son.

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———. 1989. James Joule. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

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Cotter, C. H. 1976. George Biddell Airy and his Mechanical Correction of the Magnetic Compass. Annals of Science 33:263-274.

———. 1977. The Early History of Ship Magnetism: The Airy-Scoresby Controversy. Annals of Science 34:589-599.

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———. 1919. Records. London: Hodder and Stoughton.

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Fourier, J. (A. Freeman, trans.). 1955. The Analytical Theory of Heat. New York: Dover.

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———. 1982. A Convergence of Opinion on the Divergence of Lines: Faraday and Thomson’s Discussion of Diamagnetism. Notes and Records of the Royal Society 36:243-259.

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———. 1897. Lord Kelvin’s laboratory in the University of Glasgow. Nature 55:487-492.

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———, ed. 1985. Wranglers and Physicists. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

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———. 1976. The Faraday Effect and Physical Theory, 1845-73. Archive for the History of the Exact Sciences 15:235-281.

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———. 1979. Lord Kelvin and His Compass. Journal of Navigation 32:122-134.

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