Lord Kelvin (William Thomson) was a Scottish physicist who was one of the founders of modern physics, and quite probably the greatest applied scientist of the Victorian era.

Lord Kelvin (William Thomson) was a Scottish physicist who was one of the founders of modern physics, and quite probably the greatest applied scientist of the Victorian era. William Thomson is famous for the creation of the Kelvin scale and conversion factors for the scale, which led to the second law of thermodynamics.

William Thomson was born on June 26, 1824. He grew up in Belfast, Ireland as the fourth child in a family of seven. His mother died when he was six years old. His father, James Thomson, who was a textbook writer, taught mathematics, first in Belfast and later as a professor at the University of Glasgow. He taught his sons the most recent mathematics, with an unusually close relationship between a dominant father and a submissive son while laying a strict lifestyle for his children which later served to develop William's extraordinary mind.

While most normal children attended elementary school, William, age 10 and his brother James, age 11 attended Glasgow University. While at the university, William showed an outstanding interest in the world of science when at the age of 15 he won a gold medal at Glasgow University for "An Essay on the Figure of the Earth," in which he exhibited exceptional mathematical ability. That essay, highly original, served as a source of scientific ideas for Thomson throughout his life. With this first accomplishment, his father gave him plenty of support and advice as to go to Paris to visit and ...

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Thomson received many awards and honors throughout his era in time as elected professor of natural philosophy at the University of Cambridge for example. He was also accepted into the Royal Society of London 1851 and Edinburgh 1873-1878, 1886-1890, and 1895-1907. He received two medals from the London society and one from the Edinburgh society and was the president of British Association for the Advancement of Science. There was a memorial named in Thomson’s honor called Lord Kelvin’s Stone. A landmark found in The Necropolis in Europe.

Lord Kelvin had many major accomplishments through his career as a scientist. The one that skyrocketed his career was laying the first transatlantic telegraph cable for submarines in 1866, after that the skies were the limit. He created a way to convert temperatures into Kelvin (K) and a chart to follow it by, allowing him to bring us the second law of thermodynamics which also gave recognition to Joule’s Theory. He published more than 600 papers from when he was 14 until he was 63 years old which contain most of his most famous discoveries.

I think the world would be very different if Lord Kelvin didn’t discover the things he discovered. For Instance, if he didn’t create the transatlantic cable, we would never communicate when sailors that are on submarines or families on cruise ships.

Lord Kelvin died on December 17, 1907 in Ayrshire, Scotland at the age of 83 years old. Lord Kelvin will always be remembered for the Kelvin Scale, for which we use throughout the world (SI unit) and for the transatlantic telegraph cable, for which we use to communicate underwater. If I could be like Lord Kelvin, I would like to have his self-confidence and his knowledge like he came up with a different way to measure temperature.

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