LORD KELVIN
He sat on the lower stair, near the front door of his house, making
difficult calculations and strange diagrams in a little book bound in
green morocco. It would be five minutes before the carriage started,
and he recollected that fact just as he reached the door and had put on
his overcoat. Another man, almost any other, would have idled while
the five minutes passed, and most men, especially busy men, would have
fussed nervously at having to wait when they were ready. But Lord
Kelvin, being the busiest of men, never wasted time by fussing, and
never lost it in idling. Having five minutes he would solve a problem,
so he pulled the memorandum book from his coat pocket, where he always
carried it, and sat on the stair and worked.
He was seventy then, but his spirits were as young as those of the
youngest of his students. They say that a man is as old as his
arteries. The saying might have originated with him, if it ever
occurred to him that he had arteries. But I am not sure that the
customary anatomy was not, in his case, reinforced by an ingenious
system of electrical conductors through which a mysterious energy was
driven by {97} his dynamic mind. Like all great teachers he was ever
learning. But it would be difficult to say when he began to learn, for
he was only ten years old when he entered the university! And he was
thoroughly equipped for entering upon his student work even at that
age. At twenty-two he was appointed Professor of Natural Philosophy,
and he held that professorship for the rest of his life!
Lord Kelvin was the greatest master of natural science in the
nineteenth century. The twentieth century has not, thus far, produced
his superior. He was born in 1824, he died in 1908. It was my
privilege to know him during the last fifteen years of his life. A
kinder man, one more considerate of the abysmal ignorance of the fellow
creatures with whom he came into contact, could not be imagined. He
was a plain Scotsman without a pose, without even a Scottish pose, and
it would be difficult, maybe impossible, to find a better embodiment of
life than that. Scottish he was, though born in Ireland. And his fame
was associated with that of Glasgow University which had the honour of
receiving him into student life and which received the greater honour
of his distinguished services for a period almost as long as the
psalmist allots to the life of a man.
When he was eighty-three he outlined, as, probably, he had often
outlined before, the plan of a boy's education. "By the age of
twelve," said he, "a boy should have learned to write his own language
with accuracy and some elegance; he should have a reading knowledge of
French, should be able to {98} translate Latin and easy Greek authors,
and should have some acquaintance with German. Having learned the
meaning of words, a boy should study Logic. I never found that the
small amount of Greek I learned was a hindrance to my acquiring some
knowledge of Natural Philosophy." Some knowledge of it! There,
indeed, was modesty. For who had more knowledge of natural philosophy,
or so much, as Lord Kelvin?
Is it necessary to say that he was not born to baronies? Surely, that
much all readers may be presumed to know, some wiseacre will remark.
But if one were painting a portrait instead of writing it, nothing
would be more futile than to omit the subject's nose on the presumption
that the public knew he had one. William Thomson, who became Lord
Kelvin, was born in Belfast, the younger of two brothers. The elder
brother was James, and he became famous as a professor of engineering.
He died, however, some fifteen years before his brother. James was
named for his father, and that James, the father, was born on a farm
near Ballynahinch, County Down. His Scotch ancestors had planted
themselves in Ireland in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
That farmer's boy had a huge hunger for knowledge. When he was eleven
or twelve years old he taught himself, having no teacher to aid him,
the principles of the sundial, so that he could make dials for any
latitude. Also, from books which he contrived to get, he learned the
elements of mathematics. By and by he began teaching in a little
school. He taught in the summers, and in {99} the winters he studied
at Glasgow University, continuing to do so for five years, and then he
was appointed a teacher in the Royal Academic Institute of Belfast.
When his son William had reached the age of eight, the scholarly parent
was appointed to the Professorship of Mathematics at Glasgow
University, a position he held for twenty years. His scientific
attainments were high, and his classical scholarship was distinguished.
He educated his sons himself, until each was ten, and then sent each to
the university. Lord Kelvin said to me once, when we were talking of
those early days: "I had a great father."
The Kelvin is a little stream that winds through the grounds of Glasgow
University. When Queen Victoria bestowed a peerage upon Sir William
Thomson (she had knighted him many years before that) he chose for his
title the name of the little stream by whose side he had spent his
fruitful and illustrious life. His had been a life of labour, but it
had been congenial labour. He had contributed vastly to the sum of
human knowledge; he had invented useful things, to the amazement of
pedantic men who think that science should remain with scientific
persons and never be applied to the wants of the world; at least, not
applied by the scientific discoverer of the principles or things. But
with all his theories he was a practical man, and he prospered. That
day when he sat on the stair for five minutes, and concentrated the
training of sixty years upon the page of a notebook, we went to White's.
{100}
Once upon a time there was a White, a James White, who, in Glasgow,
made instruments of precision which found their way all over the world.
And so he became the maker of various things that Sir William Thomson,
afterward Lord Kelvin, had invented. When White died, or retired, or
possibly before that, Kelvin acquired his business and establishment
and continued the manufacture of instruments of precision, the
establishment being conducted under White's name, as before, and as
possibly it may be to this day. Anyhow, we went to White's, where Lord
Kelvin took me into his laboratory and showed me, among other things,
his "Siphon Recorder" which was very interesting, albeit very puzzling
to the non-technical mind. I asked him what it did. The technical
descriptions I had read were rather baffling. His answer was: "The
electric current in an under-sea cable, say an Atlantic cable, is very
weak and weary. This reaches out from the shore, and helps it along,
and writes down what it says." It was for this invention that he was
knighted in 1866. He had connected the hemispheres.
He was one of the courageous and hopeful band that laid and worked the
first Atlantic cables. Submarine telegraphy had been first employed in
1850 when a line was laid across the English Channel between Dover and
Calais. But the scientific camps were divided in opinion about the
practicability of working across thousands of miles of ocean-bed. One
faction declared it "beyond the resources of human skill." Robert
Stephenson said the project could end only in failure. Of course, the
{101} moneyed men were timid. Most of them were more than timid; they
were scared. Faraday had found that the transmission of signals by
submarine cable, on a line from Harwich to Holland, was not
instantaneous. "The line leaked," said the financial men, "and most of
the electricity that was pumped into it spilled into the sea. This
does not occur on land lines," they said; "we will not invest."
William Thomson discovered and formulated "the law which governs the
retardation of electrical signals in submarine lines." Whitehouse
found that with a line 1125 miles long, a signal required a second and
a half for transmission. Thomson's law showed that on a line long
enough to connect Ireland with Newfoundland the transmission of a
signal would require six seconds. This meant a dismally limited
service. Only a few words could be cabled in an hour. The croakers
were pleased. The men whose habit it is to say "I told you so" were
joyous. The financiers would use their capital for other purposes.
But Cyrus Field of New York found the money, and William Thomson found
the way to utilize his own law to make success out of what had seemed
to others to be defeat. He invented the "Siphon Recorder." Then the
cable was laid under the Atlantic, and on August 17, 1858, Thomson's
instruments sent and received this message:
"Europe and America are united by telegraph. Glory to God in the
highest, and on earth peace and goodwill toward men."
Two weeks later the cable broke. The world jeered and lost faith,
according to its habit. Some {102} called the cable undertaking "a
swindle", some "a hoax", some a silly toy. These were thoughtful
critics. Eight years passed, eight years of effort to make and
submerge a cable that would endure. In 1866 the difficulties were
overcome. The world congratulated itself and the men who had worked
the "miracle." Lord Kelvin told me the story as if it had been a
little affair of the day before. "There has been so much to think of
since then," said he, "and there is so much more to be done!
Harnessing Niagara is one thing." The men who plan things and do them
were already planning for that, and as in the cable project, they
called in Lord Kelvin to help.
"How far can we transmit electricity for power and lighting purposes?"
they asked.
"Three hundred miles," said he.
They laid their plans for a much shorter distance, within a hundred
miles, and they thought that Kelvin was dreaming. Years later, when
power and lighting current had been successfully conveyed over much
greater distances than Kelvin had suggested, an acquaintance of mine
asked him: "Why did n't you tell us that electric power can be
conducted over these greater distances? I thought three hundred miles
was the limit."
"The limit is not known," replied Lord Kelvin. "In the case you refer
to, I answered a specific question regarding a specific plan undertaken
for commercial purposes. The limit was improved by time and
circumstance, not by Nature. Ten years ago we could not build the
machinery that is built {103} to-day, nor, on a great scale, employ the
conductors that are used to-day. My suggestion concerned the means
then known, not the means that might be developed in a decade."
"Well, I lost a chance," said the would-be investor, who was also a
Scot.
"So, I imagine, did the capitalists of Archimedes' day. You will
remember that they failed to provide him with a fulcrum," said Lord
Kelvin dryly.
Lord Kelvin, when a young man, became permanently lame as the result of
a skating accident, but his lameness did not retard his physical
activity. Sir William Ramsay, the celebrated chemist who had been a
pupil of Kelvin, said that it "lent emphasis to his amusing class
demonstration of 'uniform velocity' when he, Kelvin, marched back and
forth behind his lecture-bench with as even a movement as his lameness
would permit; and the class generally burst into enthusiastic applause
when he altered his pace, and introduced them to the meaning of the
word 'acceleration.'"
Ramsay's opinion was that Kelvin "was not what would be called a good
lecturer; he was too discursive." Ramsay doubted whether any man "with
a brain so much above the ordinary, so much more rapid in action than
the average, can be a first-rate teacher.... But Kelvin never allowed
the interest of his students to flag. His aptness in illustration and
his vigour of language prevented that. Lecturing one day on 'Couples',
he explained how forces must be applied to constitute a Couple and
illustrated the direction of the forces by turning around the {104}
gas-bracket. This led to a discussion on the miserable quality of
Glasgow coal-gas and how it might be improved. Following again the
main idea, he caught hold of the door and swung it to and fro; but
again his mind diverged to the difference in the structure of English
and Scottish doors. We never forgot what a 'Couple' was--but the idea
might have been conveyed more succinctly." Yes, and ten to one the
receivers of it would have forgotten what a "Couple" was!
I heard Kelvin address the Royal Society in London while he was
president of that body. He had invited me to come, and I was curious
enough to see the most distinguished scientific body in the world
learning something from the world's most distinguished mathematician,
electrician, and natural philosopher. The hall in Burlington House was
filled. Had an earthquake swallowed the hall then, the world would
have been deprived instantaneously of dozens of men who were doing its
thinking for it. The subject of the discourse was not thrilling, nor
could the lecturer have been accused of an attempt to pander to
popularity. The subject was "The Homogeneous Division of Space."
There shot through the hour's talk a stream of descriptive phrases such
as "tetrakaidekahedronal cells", "parallelepipedal partitionings",
"enantiomorphs ", and their progeny.
The genial old gentleman on the platform would rest his weight upon his
hands on the table, or the lecture-desk, and lean forward towards his
audience, and tell some puzzling facts about nature's puzzles, {105}
pouring streams of numbers and their multiplications and divisions into
their ears while they floundered in the mathematical deluge. He would
see that he had them puzzled, that his mind was working too fast for
them; he must have surmised it from the expressions on their faces, for
while he announced theories, discoveries, and drew conclusions, they,
with all their knowledge and experience, would look as blank or
bewildered as schoolboys, and he would step back from the table and,
with a winning smile, remark, "It's this way", or "After all, it's
simpler than it seems", or "I think it would be demonstrated so", and
turning swiftly on one heel would face the blackboard and draw upon it
in strokes that were like flashes, a diagram which made it all so clear
that his hearers chuckled, or laughed outright; then swiftly he would
turn again and face them with that winning smile which seemed to mean,
"See how simple it is!" Then they would applaud him, which is very
difficult for the Royal Society to do.
Lord Kelvin's was the first house in the world to be lighted by
electricity throughout. He utilized the current in every nook and
corner, in attics and cellars, in cupboards, closets and wardrobes,
long before anybody else had attempted to do so. This was when
everybody else thought electric lighting a luxury, but his purpose was
to prove it a necessity. That was his way. Whenever he acquired new
knowledge he applied it forthwith to the betterment of the human lot.
He thought that science for the sake of science, or scientists, was as
stupid a formula as "art for art's sake." Cheese for cheese's sake
{106} would be quite as useful to mankind. Of what use was knowledge
if it were not applied to the needs of man?
He was a yachtsman, but not for sporting purposes, or faddishness, or
luxurious idleness. He loved the sea, and his yacht, a schooner named
_Lalla Rookh_, enabled him to wrest from the sea some of its secrets.
For twenty years he went sailing every summer, living aboard weeks at a
time. He held the certificate of a master navigator. It was on board
the _Lalla Rookh_ that he invented his famous apparatus for taking
soundings and his no less famous compass. These things became
necessities for navigators.
The first pair of telephonic instruments that Alexander Graham Bell
brought to Europe were presented by him to Lord Kelvin, who immediately
put them to use by connecting his house with that of his brother-in-law
and assistant, Doctor J. T. Bottomley. The first electrically lighted
house in the world was the first in the old world to be connected by
telephone for purposes professional, social, personal, and domestic.
For how could Kelvin, who was always peering into the future, be afraid
of new things? He peered into the past, too, for you remember how he
startled the orthodox mind by his calculations regarding the age of the
earth.
Lord Salisbury, just before he became Prime Minister for the last time
(his long term of 1895-1902) was Chancellor of the University of Oxford
and at the same time President of the British Association for the
Advancement of Science. At Oxford, {107} in a memorable year, and in
behalf of the University of which he was chancellor, he welcomed the
association of which he was president, and he reminded his learned
listeners that Lord Kelvin, whom he alluded to as "the greatest living
master of natural science amongst us", was the first to point out that
the amount of time required by the advocates of the Darwinian theory
for the working out of the process of evolution which they had imagined
"could not be conceded without assuming the existence of a totally
different set of natural laws from those with which we are acquainted."
Hot things cool. The once seething earth has cooled and is cooling.
So many million years ago it must have been hotter than now by
calculable degrees. "But if at any time it was hotter at the surface
by fifty degrees Fahrenheit than it is now, life would then have been
impossible on this planet."
Lord Kelvin assured us that organic life on earth cannot have existed
more than a hundred million years ago. So if you believed in
Archbishop Ussher's chronology, and niggardly dealt out to the earth an
age of only six thousand years, or went so far as Professor Tait with
his ten million, you had, by Kelvin's figuring, a tremendous margin to
fill up somehow. Of course the orthodox jumped and squealed. But the
geologists and biologists stamped and yelled. Some of them wanted more
than Kelvin's stingy allowance; they wanted not one hundred million
years, but hundreds of millions. And there was a pretty ferment in the
camps!
Sir William Ramsay I have quoted on Kelvin's {108} illustration, in the
class room, of the term "acceleration." Kelvin maintained speed when
he had got it up. Remember that he was lame, and consider his energy.
He would dart at an object that stood a few feet from him, on his
lecture-bench, use it for whatever demonstration was required, and then
dart at another, or at the blackboard, or at the pointer, as if he were
a busy bee extracting honey from the flowers. There was certainty
about everything he did; no hesitation, no floundering, no hemming and
hawing for a word, or the next act. His lameness merely lent emphasis
to the fact that he was walking; it did not prevent his swiftness of
movement. Across the grounds of the university I toiled after him like
"panting time." He gave the impression of readiness for a race, and
might challenge you at any minute. His gown was always streaming
behind him, his mortar-board cap in imminent danger of blowing off in
the breeze stirred by his advance. Well, he had raced the world many
years and had always won.
Some great men are so impressed by their own greatness that their
manner becomes ponderous and vast as if they lived in a belief that
they cast shadows on the sun. Not so Lord Kelvin, who never seemed to
think that great men thought him a greater than themselves. His manner
was simple, gentle, courteous, and direct. He was easy to talk with,
and yet he had no small talk. But it was not easy to answer his
questions. There was never such a man as he for asking questions
unless it were the Chinese Viceroy, Li Hung Chang. Whatever your
profession, {109} trade, interests in life, he would put questions that
went to the roots of your matter and revealed on his part a greater
knowledge of the problems involved than you dreamed existed. By
tireless questioning he learned. But where Li Hung Chang turned the
results of his questioning to his own benefit, Kelvin applied them to
the good of the world. Yet when, in 1896, they celebrated the fiftieth
anniversary of his professorship at Glasgow he was, I take it, the most
surprised man in all the galaxy of the famous. The dear old gentleman
with the domed head, the white hair, and generous white beard seemed to
be asking himself, "What next? Why all this fuss and feathers?" But
he was apparently genuinely pleased, too, for all the tributes bespoke
honest admiration of achievement and character. Fifty-one learned
societies, twelve colleges, and twenty-eight universities were
represented. They were of all countries. That day the world, and all
that was therein, lifted its hat to Lord Kelvin.
I may slip in here a quotation from Emerson. "In Newton," said
Emerson, "science was as easy as breathing; he used the same wit to
weigh the moon that he used to buckle his shoes; and all his life was
simple, wise, and majestic. So it was in Archimedes--always self-same,
like the sky. In Linnaeus, in Franklin, the like sweetness and
equality--no stilts, no tiptoe; and their results are wholesome and
memorable to all men."
What Lord Kelvin had done, and was still to do, could not be described
by any writing of less than encyclopaedic scope, and a knowledge as
wide and {110} deep as his own. Helmholtz may be quoted, as he has
been quoted by many who attempted the larger task from a scientific
standpoint. Helmholtz was his intimate friend. Helmholtz said: "He is
an eminent mathematician, but the gift to translate real facts into
mathematical equations, and vice versa, is, by far, more rare than to
find a solution of a given mathematical problem, and in this direction
he is most eminent and original."
Kelvin's first published paper was a defence of the mathematician,
Fourier. His second was on "The Uniform Motion of Heat in Homogeneous
Solid Bodies, and Its Connection With The Mathematical Theory of
Electricity." I think he was eighteen then. He was certainly showing
the bent of his mind. Fifty or sixty years later he said, in a
presidential address to the Royal Society: "Tribulation, not
undisturbed progress, gives life and soul, and leads to success where
success can be reached." I do not know what his tribulations were, but
they may have been the tribulations of defeat. He may have faced many
defeats, but he won more successes. And the world was more concerned
with scientific discoveries during his career than it had been in the
time of Count Rumford and Humphry Davy, whose work in disproving that
heat is a material body had been forgotten because nobody seemed to
think it more important than curious. Sometime in the eighteen-forties
James Prescott Joule ascertained the dynamical equivalent of heat, and
settled the fact that heat is a mode of motion. Kelvin may be said to
have leaped to the side of his friend.
{111}
Lord Kelvin was the first to appreciate the importance of Joule's
discovery, and it was not long before he placed the whole subject of
thermodynamics on a scientific basis. He put his conclusions into
these easily understandable words: "During any transformation of energy
of one form into energy of another form, there is always a certain
amount of energy rendered unavailable for further useful application.
No known process in nature is exactly reversible: that is to say, there
is no known process by which we can convert a given amount of energy of
one form into energy of another form, and then, reversing the process,
reconvert the energy of the second form thus obtained into the original
quantity of energy of the first form. In fact, during any
transformation of energy from one form into another, there is always a
certain portion of energy changed into heat in the process of
conversion, and the heat thus produced becomes dissipated and diffused
by radiation and conduction. Consequently there is a tendency in
nature for all the energy in the universe, of whatever kind it be,
gradually to assume the form of heat, and having done so to become
equally diffused. Now, were all the energy of the universe converted
into uniformly diffused heat, it would cease to be available for
producing mechanical effort, since, for that purpose, we must have a
hot source and a cooler condenser. This gradual degradation of energy
is perpetually going on, and, sooner or later, unless there be some
restorative power of which we have, at present, no knowledge whatever,
the present state of things must come to an end."
{112}
He revealed the Electrodynamics of Qualities of Metals; the size of
atoms, the horse-power of the sun; he determined the rigidity of the
earth, the laws of the tides, made far-reaching discoveries in
electricity, in vortex motion; it might be said of him that he took the
universe for his field.
But in a chapter like this one is tempted to dwell too long on high
achievements. What attracted one more than the achievements was the
man, the kindly, sympathetic man who loved truth not celebrity, and
work more than its rewards. He was ever the same, whether one met him
in Glasgow, London, at sea, or in America, the same simple,
straightforward, kindly character. He retained his mental activity to
the end. He died at eighty-four, and seemed only to be departing on
another journey in quest of truth and friendship.
On one of the afternoons when I sat with him in his study, within the
precincts of the university, he said, "Patience, great patience is the
need of this generation. It asks results before it earns them. Man is
too wasteful of the resources he finds in the earth. The most of our
coal is lost in smoke; the most of our heat is dissipated in the air.
We need patience not less than courage in dealing with our problems."
The study was lined with engravings and photographs. Darwin and Joule
and Faraday looked down from the walls, and there were pictures of the
cable-laying ships, the _Hooper_, and the _Great Eastern_. There were
trophies of travel,--from specimens of sea-bottom along the African
coast, to quite personal mementos of his lectures at {113} Johns
Hopkins University and other places in America.
A typical day of Lord Kelvin's was, in outline, this: After breakfast
he would, at nine, face his class in the university and lecture for an
hour. I heard him in such an hour lecture on "Kepler's Laws." He
lectured to his class three days a week. After the lecture he would go
to White's where he was perfecting an electric metre. After White's he
would return to the university and lecture until one o'clock, say, on
the "Higher Mathematics." Then home to lunch. After lunch consulting
work on the lighting of a town by electricity. After that an hour in
Lady Kelvin's drawing-room, taking tea with friends. Then work in the
study over the laws governing the formation of crystals. Then dinner.
Then calculations in the study, or writing a paper for one of the
numerous societies of which he was a working member. In the intervals,
with his secretary's aid, he would attend to his correspondence. And,
if waiting for his secretary, out of a coat pocket would come the
little green book, and into it would go notes, calculations, or
diagrams, perhaps all three. That little green book would come out
whenever he had a minute to spare, in his dressing-room, or on the
stairs, or in a train, or a cab, wherever he happened to be, and the
thought flashed. I often wondered what his thoughts were on the
conservation of personal energy.
{114}