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Absolute temperatures are stated in units of kelvin in Lord Kelvin's honour. While the existence of a coldest possible temperature, absolute zero , was known before his work, Kelvin determined its correct value as approximately −273.15 degrees Celsius or −459.67 degrees Fahrenheit . [ 13 ]
The Kelvin water dropper, invented by Scottish scientist William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) in 1867, [1] is a type of electrostatic generator. Kelvin referred to the device as his water-dropping condenser. The apparatus is variously called the Kelvin hydroelectric generator, the Kelvin electrostatic generator, or Lord Kelvin's thunderstorm.
Charles Hesterman Merz (5 October 1874 – 14 or 15 October 1940) was a British electrical engineer who pioneered the use of high-voltage three-phase AC power distribution in the United Kingdom, building a system in the North East of England in the early 20th century that became the model for the country's National Grid.
He was born in Edinburgh on 24 October 1868, the eldest son of Alexander Erskine Erskine-Murray , Sheriff of Glasgow (1832-1907), and his wife, Helen Pringle, [1] daughter of Robert Pringle of Symington. [2] In 1886 he began study under Lord Kelvin at Glasgow University assisting Kelvin in electrical experiments from 1888 and graduating BSc in ...
It had been long known that continuous electric currents flowed through the solid and liquid portions of the Earth, [5] and the collection of current from an electrically conductive medium in the absence of electrochemical changes (and in the absence of a thermoelectric junction) was established by Lord Kelvin. [6] [7] Lord Kelvin's "sea ...
One of the earliest practical uses of Thomson's concepts was a tide-predicting machine built by Kelvin starting in 1872–3. On Lord Kelvin's advice, Thomson's integrating machine was later incorporated into a fire-control system for naval gunnery being developed by Arthur Pollen, resulting in an electrically driven, mechanical analogue ...
An entirely new system, providing continuous automatic recording, was installed by Lord Kelvin personally in the early 1860s. This device, based on Kelvin's water dropper potential equaliser with photographic recording, [17] was known as the Kew electrograph. It provided the backbone of a long and almost continuous series of potential gradient ...
Between 1870 and 1890 the vortex atom theory, which hypothesised that an atom was a vortex in the aether, was popular among British physicists and mathematicians. William Thomson, who became better known as Lord Kelvin, first conjectured that atoms might be vortices in the aether that pervades space.