Kelvin. Lord

The way ahead was now, at last, clear for Joule. He had soldiered on and had won through to recognition and acceptance. In 1850 the Royal Society published his account of new and very accurate paddle-wheel experiments which gave the figure of 772 ft.lbs for the mechanical value of a unit of heat. From this time onwards Joule could extend and consolidate his theory, devise even more accurate methods for determining his constant, and find further instances of the great principle of the convertibility of energy in nature. (Cardwell, pp.232-236) 

10 Kelvin, Clausius and the Establishment of the First, and Second Laws 

William Thomson was knighted in 1866for his services in connection with the great Atlantic cable and was made Lord Kelvin of Largs in 1892, 

Joule won the battle but the war was not over, by far. No other than the very sympathetic to Joule - as we have seen - Kelvin, in his 1849 paper on Account of Carnot s Theory of the Motive Power of Heat with Numerical Results derived from Regnault s Experiments on Steam still has very strong doubts. Cardwell writes  

When thermal agency is thus spent in conducting heat through a solid what becomes of the mechanical ect which it might produce Nothing can be lost in the operations of nature - no energy can be destroyed. 

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The wavelength of ripples on the surface of a deep body of liquid depends on the surface tension. According to a formula given by Lord Kelvin [97],... 

Historically, the first and most important capacitance method is the vibrating capacitor approach implemented by Lord Kelvin in 1897. In this technique (now called the Kelvin probe), the reference plate moves relative to the sample surface at some constant frequency and tlie capacitance changes as tlie interelectrode separation changes. An AC current thus flows in the external circuit. Upon reduction of the electric field to zero, the AC current is also reduced to zero. Originally, Kelvin detected the zero point manually using his quadrant electrometer. Nowadays, there are many elegant and sensitive versions of this technique. A piezoceramic foil can be used to vibrate the reference plate. To minimize noise and maximize sensitivity, a phase-locked... 

These local stmctural rules make it impossible to constmct a regular, periodic, polyhedral foam from a single polyhedron. No known polyhedral shape that can be packed to fiU space simultaneously satisfies the intersection rules required of both the films and the borders. There is thus no ideal stmcture that can serve as a convenient mathematical idealization of polyhedral foam stmcture. Lord Kelvin considered this problem, and his minimal tetrakaidecahedron is considered the periodic stmcture of polyhedra that most nearly satisfies the mechanical constraints. 

In 1857, Thomson (Lord Kelvin) placed the whole field on firmer footing by using the newly developing field of thermodynamics (qv) to clarify the relationship between the Seebeck and the Peltier effects. He also discovered what is subsequently known as the Thomson effect, a much weaker thermoelectric phenomenon that causes the generation or absorption of heat, other than Joule heat, along a current-carrying conductor in a temperature gradient. 

For a long time it was thought that soap foams, grains in metals and so on were icosahedra. It took Lord Kelvin (of the degree K) to get it right. 

Carnot s research also made a major contribution to the second law of thermodynamics. Since the maximum efficiency of a Carnot engine is given by 1 -T( H, if the engine is to be 100 percent efficient (i.e., Cma = 1), Tc must equal zero. This led William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) to propose in 1848 that Tf must be the absolute zero of the temperature scale later known as the absolute scale or Kelvin scale. ... 

After Pierre s death, Marie was faced with having to present her work without the support and social skills of her husband. Furthermore, she spent numerous years defending her work from William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) who did not believe that radioactivity... 

It IS wrong to see Maxwell s achievement as one of merely translating Faraday s ideas into precise mathematical language. Though he once described Faraday as the nucleus of eveiything electric since 1830, two other men, William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) and Wilhelm Weber, were equally influential. 

Smith, C., and Wise, N. (1889). Energy and Empire A Biographical Study of Lord Kelvin. New York Cambridge University Press. 

Thomson, William (Lord Kelvin) (1824-1907) Crosbie Smith... 

This scale is named after Lord Kelvin (1824-1907), a British scientist who showed in 1848, at the age of 24, that it is impossible to reach a temperature lower than 0 K. 

Lord Kelvin (1895) in Untitled Comments , Chemical News 71, No. 1836, p. 63. 

This very important theorem was recognised by R. Clausius in 1850, although he did not at the time give the very simple interpretation, in terms of the conception of intrinsic energy, which was brought forward by Lord Kelvin a year later. 

The exact form of the function < > (T2, T being to some extent arbitrary, we might give several definitions of absolute temperature, all drawn up, however, in terms of the efficiency of the reversible engine. Lord Kelvin, in 1854, adopted the following form ... 

The size of the degree alone remains to be fixed, and is quite arbitrary. To produce as little change as possible from the ordinary scale, Lord Kelvin divided the range of temperature between the absolute temperature of melting ice T0, and that of boiling water, Ti, into 100 equal parts, each of which is defined as one degree. 

This may be called the maximum work for a given quantity of heat and a given distribution of temperatures the rest of the heat is irrecoverably lost so far as its availability for producing work is concerned, and is therefore wasted, but not destroyed (Lord Kelvin, 1849). 

The preceding considerations are summarised in a very general principle, enunciated by Lord Kelvin in 1852, and called the... 

In the operations constituting a Carnot s cycle, changes of Q and T occur separately. In the majority of cases both these changes occur together, so that the temperature of the working substance may be regarded as a function of the time. Equation (4) therefore requires extension, and this was effected by Lord Kelvin in May, 1854, in the following way ... 

The maximum amount of work obtainable from a given quantity of heat, called its motivity by Lord Kelvin (1852), is thus always less than the mechanical equivalent of the quantity of heat, except in the limiting case when the refrigerator is at absolute zero (T2 = 0). It cannot be specified in terms of the condition of the body from which the heat is taken, or into which the heat passes, but requires in addition a knowdedge of the lowest available temperature, T2. For if we had another body at temperature T0, where T0 < T2, which could be used as a refrigerator, the amount of work ... 

The application of the principle of entropy to irreversible processes has given rise to much discussion and controversy. The exposition here adopted is based on the investigations of Lord Kelvin (1852) in connexion with Dissipation of Energy. 

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