Inspiring innovators

WILLIAM THOMSON:POLYMATHS HAVE a tough time of it these days – it's hard to be taken seriously when you're focusing on umpteen different projects in umpteen different fields. But back in the Victorian era of the gentleman inventor, why, it was positively the fashion to add myriad different accomplishments to your curriculum vitae.

One of the original species was William Thomson, better known as Lord Kelvin – so versatile he even had two names. Thomson was a monumental figure in shaping physics in the relatively early days of the discipline, and also managed to be one of the most accomplished engineers of his generation – it was the sort of multidisciplinary career that is unheard of today.

Born in Belfast in 1824 to James Thomson, a maths teacher at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution, Thomson was a sickly child, suffering heart problems in early life. By the time he was 10, his father had become a maths professor in Glasgow University, and young William moved to the city that was to be his home for the rest of his life.

His father provided an expensive education, allowing him to study in Europe, and he excelled as a graduate student in Cambridge, focusing on maths and electrical science. In 1846, at the still tender age of 22, he was appointed to the chair of natural philosophy in the University of Glasgow, a position he was to hold for more than 50 years.

This was a period when the relationship between energy, temperature and entropy was still being explored; Thomson was the first to define the nascent field of thermodynamics, and his work helped formulate the first and second laws of thermodynamics.

He also established the concept of absolute zero – the point at which no further heat could be transferred. This resulted in the definition of the unit of temperature that came to be known as the Kelvin. Related to this was his collaboration with James Prescott Joule and the establishment of kinetic theory. Thomson was still only in his early 30s, and he was already reshaping our understanding of the world in fundamental ways.

All of these accomplishments alone would have been enough to establish Thomson as a giant on whose shoulders others would soon stand, but his innovative thinking didn’t end there. In the mid-1850s, he began to add to his pioneering work in physics when he became involved in developing the first transatlantic telegraph cable – it was this work that would earn Thomson fame, fortune and a knighthood.

The epic attempts to lay a cable across the Atlantic to allow for rapid communication from the Old World to the New, is one of the most enthralling 19th-century feats of engineering. There was obviously a lot riding on the success of the project, with the Atlantic Telegraph Company investing huge amounts in developing a viable cable system. However, the engineering challenges seemed intractable – for the cable to be profitable, it needed an ample carrying capacity, and ensuring that capacity over a cable that ran the length of the Atlantic floor was no easy task.

Enter Thomson and his unerring mathematical ability. His calculations on the potential speed of data transfer through the cable saw him elected to the board of the Atlantic Telegraph Company in 1856.

The group of scientists and engineers that engaged in making the project a success was a dream team of Victorian thinkers. Wildman Whitehouse acted as chief electrician, Michael Faraday and Samuel Morse were advisers, Charles Tilston Bright was chief engineer and Thomson himself became a very hands-on consultant, often clashing with Whitehouse over his cable specifications, which Thomson suspected were insufficient.

In 1857, he sailed on the HMS Agamemnon during its first, failed attempt to lay the cable, and over the following few years he developed a range of technologies for enhancing the cable, including a telegraph receiver called a mirror galvanometer. Ultimately, however, Whitehouse’s designs were shown to be inadequate and Thomson was tasked with salvaging what had, until then, been an expensive folly.

In 1865 and again in 1866, Thomson sailed on the famous iron steam ship the SS Great Eastern, designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, from Valentia Island, off Kerry, to Newfoundland in Canada. Despite storms and numerous crises, the cable was successfully laid, and thanks to Thomson’s numerous innovations, marked the start of a new era in global communications. In November 1866, he was knighted for his efforts.

In subsequent years, he managed to maintain his role at Glasgow University with yet more marine-cable adventures, working on cables from France and Brazil. Out of all this seafaring came another invention, a much improved mariner’s compass, making it a far more reliable instrument than had previously been the case.

In 1892, he was raised to the peerage as Baron Kelvin of Largs – after the Kelvin River near Glasgow – and became widely known as Lord Kelvin. In this role, he was vocal in opposing Irish Home Rule. It was not the only issue that he found himself on the wrong side of history – famously, he is reputed to have dismissed the possibility of both X-rays and aeroplanes, saying “heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible”. He also disagreed with many of Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theories, misled both by his own Christian belief and his mistaken attempts at calculating the age of the Earth.

He was, of course, a product of his time, and while his knowledge was limited by the information available to him, he succeeded in dramatically increasing the knowledge available to those who followed. As he put it himself: “Scientific wealth tends to accumulate according to the law of compound interest. Every addition to knowledge of the properties of matter supplies new instrumental means for discovering and interpreting phenomena of nature, which in their turn afford foundations of fresh generalisations, bringing gains of permanent value into the great storehouse of philosophy.”

To that end, he published more than 600 scientific papers and owned 70 patents. He died in 1907, aged 83, and is buried in Westminster Abbey, near the tomb of Isaac Newton.