122 



DISCOVERY 



Reviews of Books 



Silvaniis Pliillips Thompson, D.Sc, LL.D.. F.R.S.: 

 His Life and Letters. By Jane Smeal Thompson 

 and Helen G. Thompson, B.Sc. (Fisher Unwin, 

 2IS. net.) 



Professor Silvanus Thompson was born in 1851 and 

 died in 1916. Those sixty-five years of his were crowded 

 ones, for he was a man of restless activity. He made a 

 name for himself first and foremost as a science teacher. 

 He made important contributions to our knowledge of 

 electricity, optics, and electro-technology. He was the 

 author of several very clearly written textbooks. He 

 was the biographer of Faraday and of Lord Kelvin. He 

 was, in addition, a man of varied tastes and hobbies. 

 He was a member of the Society of Friends. He loved 

 the scientific literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth 

 centuries. He drew in black-and-white, and painted in 

 water-colours. A man of varied interests, the chief of 

 which was in Science. 



We are indebted for this interesting biography to his 

 wife and his daughter. They have given us a happy and 

 intimate account of the professor. The material on which 

 the book is based has been well used, and the style and 

 the setting forth is good. Very \visely the authoresses 

 have arranged their material, not in strict chronological 

 order, but according to subject. This helps to make 

 a book easy to refer to, and easy to read. In the case 

 of scientific biography it enables the non-technical reader 

 to read what interests him most. The more technical 

 details, being grouped in one or two chapters, may, if 

 desired, be skipped. 



Silvanus Thompson was a familiar figure in scientific 

 circles in London, because from 1S85 till his death he was 

 the principal of Finsbury Technical College. The Royal 

 Society and the Royal Institution saw much of him, and 

 popular audiences at the latter heard with delight his 

 expositions of scientific knowledge. He was an exceed- 

 ingly good lecturer. No trouble was too much for him, 

 no experiment too difficult. It was all worth while if it 

 would serve to make his lectures clearer. Better under- 

 stood, better remembered. 



He began research at Bristol, where in 1876 he had 

 been appointed Lecturer in Physics at the newly founded 

 University College, and his first paper on phenomena 

 connected with induced electric sparks was printed in 

 the same year in the Philosophical Magazine. The long 

 list of published papers which is given in the appendix 

 of the biography testify to his originality, his versatiUty, 

 and to his capacity for work. Like Lord Kelvin, he had 

 that wonderful power of taking the most extraordinary 

 interest in anything that was new. If he had an interest 

 in a thing, it was a keen interest, an enthusiasm. All his 

 research was good work, though actually, as it happened, 

 none of it became epoch-making. Once, indeed, he 

 came near to a very big thing, but someone else arrived 

 independently at substantially the same results a little 

 before him. In 1895 the discovery of X-rays by Pro- 

 fessor Rontgen of Wurzburg made a tremendous sensa- 



tion. A few months later, Thompson, while working 

 with X-rays, found that uranium nitrate had an action 

 on a photographic plate in circumstances in which 

 X-rays had not. This was something new, and he 

 ^vrote immediately to Stokes, then President of the Royal 

 Society, about it. Alas ! Becquerel of Paris had antici- 

 pated him by a few weeks. This was the first discovery 

 in the science which later became known as radio-activity. 



In 1881 Thompson's book Elementary Lessons in Mag- 

 netism and Electricity was published. This was a very 

 good textbook. It has had a wide sale, and has served 

 more than one generation of students. T%vo years later 

 he wrote an account of Reis, the inventor of the tele- 

 phone. The invention of the telephone is usually as- 

 cribed to Dr. Graham Bell, but in this book Thompson 

 showed that, sixteen years before Bell's invention was 

 made known, a Philipp Reis of Frankfort made an instru- 

 ment for the express purpose of transmitting speech by 

 electricity, and called it the " Telephon." 



Thompson was very keen that honour of priority of 

 invention should go where honour was due, and several 

 controversies on this point in which he took part, especi- 

 ally in connection with the invention of the dynamo and 

 of wireless telegraphy, are touched on in the work under 

 review. 



In 1896 appeared Light Visible and Invisible, a popular 

 and well-written book. Two years later appeared his 

 life of Faraday. This is considered to be the best life of 

 Faraday. It was a success, and Thompson used it later 

 on as a testimonial in his favour to obtain permission 

 from Lord Kelvin to write his biography. Kelvin granted 

 this request at once, and gave Thompson several " sit- 

 tings," at which scientific topics were discussed, and 

 questions were asked and answered to help him in this 

 work. The Kelvin biography appeared in two volumes 

 in 1910. 



In the same year there was published anonymously 

 Calculus made Easy, by F. R. S. Thompson wrote this, 

 but the authorship was not disclosed till after his death. 

 The idea of this book was to make the main principles of 

 the Differential Calculus plain to many who had hitherto 

 been rather frightened by it. The book was written in 

 a very amusing colloquial style, and in the Prologue he 

 wrote : 



" Being myself a remarkably stupid fellow, I have had 

 to unteach myself the difficulties, and now beg to present 

 to my fellow-fools the parts that are not hard. Master 

 these thoroughly, and the rest will follow. WTiat one 

 fool can do. another can." 



Everyone enjoys a " leg-pull," and much wise and clear 

 exposition went with this one. The book was an in- 

 stant success, and justified completely the somewhat 

 novel and ingenious way of presenting a difficult subject 

 A few guessed who the author was, but many who should 

 have been able to didn't. 



For an account of Professor Thompson's excursions into 

 the scientific literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth 

 centuries, and particularly of his devotion to Gilbert, the 

 father of magnetism, we must refer the reader to the 

 biography. 



