On 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 mandatory, 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 afflicted 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
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, exuberant, 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 magnificent residences of the gilded age. At grand dinner parties on successive evenings, American politicians and foreign ambassadors, as well as technical 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 electricity. 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
scientist, an appellation Kelvin disliked. He preferred the old-fashioned designation “natural philosopher.” Only in the last half century had science 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 electrician was one versed in the science of electricity and magnetism, natural phenomena that had only recently begun to yield to scientific understanding 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 telegraph 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 generate 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 illustrious 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 achievements lay in the realm of pure science. He mentioned the doctrine of the
conservation of energy. Kelvin had been one of those who had brought into being this profound law, which now stood “as the basis of not a few of the advancements made during the last half century in both pure and applied science.”
Here was a man, in other words, who had contributed profoundly to the development of fundamental physical principles and who had in addition turned those elementary insights toward practical ends. In 1902, when Rhees lauded his visitor, the creation of mechanical devices and technological instruments according to the principles of science was not yet a routinely accepted part of ordinary life. The telephone had been around for two decades or so but was still considered a luxury. Electricity as a source of domestic power was not yet widespread. Cars were barely known, airplanes nonexistent. Technology was just beginning to impinge on the lives of ordinary men and women. It was seen almost without reservation as a boon and a blessing. Science was the harbinger of a new world of convenience, of labor-saving devices, of vast industries. It represented progress, as yet unsullied by doubts. Those who brought technology to life were rare and remarkable men. Often, like the incomparable Thomas Edison, they were men of incalculable ingenuity but no deep scientific knowledge. The true scientists, on the other hand, generally stayed aloft in their abstract realm and did not deign to come to earth. Uniquely, Kelvin existed in both spheres, as scientist and technologist, academic and entrepreneur, a philosopher and a practical man rolled into one.
When he died in December 1907, a few years after his visit to Rochester, Kelvin was buried at Westminster Abbey with all the pomp and ceremony Great Britain could muster. He was laid in a tomb alongside Isaac Newton, that unapproachable icon of pure science. The proximity seemed just: surely the names Kelvin and Newton would live on forever in the same exalted rank.
***
Not exactly. Everybody has heard of Newton. Few these days know of Kelvin. His name survives, for those with a little physics education, in the absolute temperature scale. The lowest temperature attainable, −273.15° Celsius, is zero on the Kelvin scale. There used to be an Ameri-
can company, based in Detroit, that made refrigerators under the brand name Kelvinator. There is no direct connection. The company launched the line in 1918, to pay scientifically appropriate tribute to a man who had done much to develop the modern understanding of temperature and no doubt also to cash in on a still-famous name.
Celebrity is notoriously fragile, of course, but scientific reputations do not normally wax and wane according to the whims of one era or the next. Milestones in science stand forever; those who erect them gain permanent recognition. Yet in a poll conducted by the U.K. Institute of Physics in 1999, Kelvin’s name did not feature in the top 10 all-time greats of physics, or even among 18 also-rans. How could a man routinely described in his lifetime as Britain’s and perhaps the world’s greatest scientist have become so cruelly neglected?
Even while he was alive, however, a gulf had developed between Kelvin’s public persona and his reputation among researchers. In the newspapers he was scientific knowledge and brilliance personified; at scientific meetings, which he attended eagerly until the year he died, he had become something of a crank, a living fossil, a holdover from an almost forgotten era. He had reservations about the existence of atoms; he believed the earth was no more than a hundred million years old; he would not wholly accept the novelty of radioactivity. Even in his position as “eminent electrician” he had parted company from the mainstream. James Clerk Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetism had by then gained universal recognition as a full account of electric and magnetic physics. Or not quite universally: Kelvin would not accept it, even though, decades earlier, his own innovative ideas had been Maxwell’s first inspiration.
In his judgments on technological matters too he displayed the dogged certainty of an opinionated old man. The Times reporter who caught a few words with him as he disembarked in New York in 1902 asked him about the prospects of two new scientific wonders, wireless telegraphy and airships. The first, Kelvin said, “is one of the world’s most remarkable inventions … very marvelous indeed.” Of the second he declared that “they will never be able to use dirigible balloons as a means of conveying passengers from place to place…. It is all a delusion and a snare … not practicable.”
Thus stands, in histories of science, the enduring image of Lord
Kelvin. An old man, out of touch with the new science of the early 20th century. An old man who said no to atoms, no to Maxwell’s electromagnetic theory, no to radioactivity. A crank, in other words. In the decades after his death Kelvin’s scientific reputation sank rapidly and has still not risen back to anything like its peak. His name was posthumously attached to the scientific temperature scale in 1954, and with good reason. I wonder, though, whether the average physicist today could explain in any detail what it was that Kelvin did to make this commemoration appropriate. What mostly survives, for those who know the name Kelvin at all, is the image of a crotchety, white-haired man, quick to oppose what he couldn’t understand.
***
That, in any case, is how I too was ready to perceive Kelvin when I first came across him in historical context. For much of his life he fought a running battle against geologists and biologists over the age of the earth. Starting from elementary laws of energy conservation and heat loss, Kelvin declared with unwavering conviction that our planet could be no more than a hundred million years old. Most likely it was no more than 20 million years old. Geologists, who had devised increasingly respectable theories of the formation and erosion of rocks, and biologists, armed with discoveries of fossils and more recently with Darwin’s theory of evolution, chafed against this limitation. Kelvin’s reasoning was, at the time, not unreasonable, but he stuck to it with blind stubbornness even as new facts and ideas came to light that knocked holes in many of his arguments.
I used this episode as a cautionary tale in my book The End of Physics, a critical survey of the development of physics through the 20th century. Kelvin’s arguments had been solid and his logic impeccable. Even so, he was wrong. The earth is now known to be 4.5 billion years old, a figure Kelvin would have found ludicrous. Tough! Kelvin struck me as the perfect illustration of a physicist inclined to lay down the law to lesser scientific disciplines, despite imperfect information and unproven assumptions. When I learned also of his attitude about atoms, electromagnetism, and radioactivity, I got a clear picture of a man who with unfailing consistency put his money on all the wrong horses. There was
the curious circumstance that Queen Victoria, or rather her advisers, had seen fit to raise him to the peerage—the first scientist, as I later discovered, to be so honored—but at that time I didn’t know how celebrated he had been in his day, or why. I continued to think of him as one of the numerous minor-league scientists who populate old textbooks and later sink into the footnotes.
My views began to change a few years ago as I was researching my account of the life and work of the Austrian physicist and atomic pioneer Ludwig Boltzmann. I encountered Lord Kelvin at a much earlier stage in his life, when he still went by the name he was born with, William Thomson. In the late 1840s and early 1850s he was in his 20s, and his reputation existed only among his fellow scientists. But what a reputation! This young man, only a few years out of college, had already made astonishing progress in the quest to understand the nature of heat, work, and energy, and in the parallel effort to elucidate the nature of electricity and magnetism. Both subjects were then in their infancies, and here in the middle of it all was William Thomson, a mathematical prodigy who had first published original work at the age of 16 and whose inspirations were showing others how to untangle the great puzzles of the time. Not just in Britain but among the great scientists of France and Germany he was regarded as the most promising talent to have appeared in decades. The middle of the 19th century saw the foundation of what we now call classical physics—the science of heat and light, of electricity and magnetism—and William Thomson, not yet 30 years of age, was at the heart of it, propounding ideas and principles still taught today at the core of any course on basic physics.
But this only deepened my earlier puzzlement. From my own education in physics I was familiar with a good number of notable names from the 19th century, but either I had forgotten about William Thomson completely or else I had never learned much about him in the first place. Why were his apparently fundamental contributions not part of my general knowledge? And how did the quicksilver William Thomson, agile and original, turn into the doddery and skeptical Lord Kelvin?
Gradually I began to amass references to Kelvin and his wide-ranging achievements. There was Kelvin’s circulation theorem in fluid mechanics, and the Kelvin-Helmholtz timescale in the physics of stars.
The V-shaped waves created by the bow of a ship speeding through water diverge, someone told me, at the Kelvin angle. I learned from a footnote somewhere that an important proof in vector calculus known as Stokes’s theorem first appeared in a letter from William Thomson to his friend George Gabriel Stokes, who later set it as an exam problem for Cambridge students, which is why his name and not Thomson’s became attached to it.
Then there was his connection to the transatlantic submarine cables, for which he developed the theory of undersea signal transmission, and his involvement with the British Royal Navy in devising new navigational instruments. There was the firm of Kelvin and White, a Glasgow maker of telegraph equipment, scientific and laboratory instruments, and, toward the end of the 19th century, household electricity meters.
I came across Kelvin again in a still more unlikely setting. Lauren Belfer’s 1999 novel City of Light is a melodrama of murder and romance set in Buffalo in 1901—the year of President McKinley’s assassination there. The new hydroelectric power plant at Niagara Falls feeds electricity to the booming town and its greedy businessmen. A rag-tag group opposes the power station, fearing that those behind it want to take every drop of water from the falls and dry up one of the country’s natural wonders. The leader of the activists claims that the industrialists aim to consume Niagara Falls altogether, to sacrifice it completely to capitalism. “Has not their own prophet declared this policy?” the activist declares. “Their own ‘President of the International Niagara Commission,’ their prophet of darkness—Lord Kelvin!”
Prophet of darkness indeed! Here was a contrast to the awestruck praise from Dr. Rhees and the wild cheering of his Rochester students!
***
But I am running ahead. Behind the name William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, lay, so it now seemed, half a dozen different people. The question remained: How did youthful brilliance turn into resistance and obstructionism? Was the aged Kelvin a disappointed man? Angry? Oblivious?
This book is my attempt to disentangle and then recombine the many elements of his life in order to resolve its mysterious, possibly tragic path: early renown, established brilliance, stubborn old age, and abrupt
posthumous fall. It’s a complicated tale, and a chronological catalog of his activities would make confusing reading, to say the least. Inevitably, I have had to tease and rearrange, with good intentions, I hope, although we all know where those can lead. As my apologia I can do no better than borrow Kelvin’s own words. In January 1883 he delivered a lecture to the Institution of Civil Engineers in London in which he dilated on the seemingly dreary but actually, as we shall see, contentious and intricate matter of the standardization of practical units for the measurement of electrical quantities. Characteristically, he struck out with enthusiastic digressions on subjects he had intended to dispose of in just a few sentences, and his lecture waxed on beyond the allotted time. Even so, his audience detained him with questions, and he drew warm applause and thanks for his efforts. In conclusion he replied:
“I wish I could have made it more clear, and placed it before you more methodically. All I can say is, that I have done my best, and I am much obliged to you for your patience.”