LIFE AND WORK OF LORD KELVIN THOMPSON. 749 



philosophy at Glasgow became vacant by the death of Professor 

 Meikleham, and Thomson, at the age of 22, was chosen to fill it. His 

 father, Prof. James Thomson — he died in 1849 — still held the chair 

 of mathematics. Prof. Thomas Thomson held that of chemistry, 

 while Prof. Allen Thomson occupied the chair of anatomy. William 

 Thomson was the youngest of the five Professors Thomson then 

 holding office in Glasgow. He chose for the subject of his inaugural 

 lecture : " On the distribution of heat through the earth." 



This professorship he continued to hold till he resigned it in 1899, 

 after continuous service of fifty-three years. Of his work as a 

 university teacher this is hardly the occasion to say much; it will 

 be fully described by his pupil and successor. Prof. Andrew Gray. 

 The old college buildings where he lectured and worked for twenty- 

 four years were ill-adapted for any laboratory facilities, yet he 

 contrived to organize a physics laboratory — the first of its kind in 

 Great Britain — in some disused rooms in a dark corner of one of the 

 quadrangles, and enlisted the voluntary service of a number of keen 

 students in his early experimental researches on the electrodynamic 

 and thermoelectric properties of matter. In the lecture theater his 

 manifest enthusiasms won for him the love and respect of all stu- 

 dents, even those who were hopelessly unable to follow his frequent 

 flights into the more abstruse realms of mathematical physics. 



Over the earnest students of natural philosophy he exercised an 

 influence little short of inspiration, an influence which extended 

 gradually far beyond the bounds of his own university. 



The next few years were times of strenuous work, fruitful in 

 results. By the end of 1850, when he was 26 years of age, he had 

 published no fewer than 50 original papers, mostly highl}^ mathe- 

 matical in character, and several of them in French. Among these 

 researches there is a remarkable group which originated in his 

 attendance in 1847 at the meeting of the British Association. He 

 had prepared for reading at that meeting a paper on the exceedingly 

 elegant process discovered by himself of treating certain problems 

 of electrostatics by the method of electric images, a method even now 

 not sufficiently well appreciated. But a more important event was 

 the commencement of his friendship with Joule, whom he met here 

 for the first time. Joule, a Manchester brewer, and honorary secre- 

 tary of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, had for 

 several years been pursuing his researches on the relations between 

 heat, electricity, and mechanical work. Incited at first by Sturgeon 

 into investigations on the electromagnet, and on the performance o 

 electromagnetic engines — that is, electric motors — Joule had alrea^"' 

 in 1840, communicated to the Royal Society a paper on the " ^ 

 duction of heat by voltaic electricity." He had also read pap- 



