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Lord Kelvin was commemorated on the £20 note issued by the Clydesdale Bank in 1971; in the current issue of banknotes, his image appears on the bank's £100 note. He is shown holding his adjustable compass and in the background is a map of the transatlantic cable.
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 ...
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.
The first tide predicting machine (TPM) was built in 1872 by the Légé Engineering Company. [11] A model of it was exhibited at the British Association meeting in 1873 [12] (for computing 8 tidal components), followed in 1875-76 by a machine on a slightly larger scale (for computing 10 tidal components), was designed by Sir William Thomson (who later became Lord Kelvin). [13]
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 ...
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 ...
William Thomson, later to become Lord Kelvin, became concerned with the nature of Dalton's chemical elements, whose atoms appeared in only a few forms but in vast numbers. He was inspired by Helmholtz's findings, reasoning that the aether , a substance then hypothesised to pervade all of space, should be capable of supporting such stable vortices.
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 ...