Waterston, John James

It is one of the wonders of the history of physics that a rigorous theory of the behaviour of a chaotic assembly of molecules - a gas - preceded by several decades the experimental uncovering of the structure of regular, crystalline solids. Attempts to create a kinetic theory of gases go all the way back to the Swiss mathematician, Daniel Bernouilli, in 1738, followed by John Herapath in 1820 and John James Waterston in 1845. But it fell to the great James Clerk Maxwell in the 1860s to take... 

Despite the dominance of Newton s view, some people followed the kinetic interpretation. In 1738, Daniel Bernoulli, a Swiss mathematician and physicist, gave a quantitative explanation of Boyle s law using the kinetic interpretation. He even suggested that molecules move faster at high temperatures, in order to explain Amontons s experiments on the temperature dependence of gas volume and pressure. However, Bernoulli s paper attracted little notice. A similar kinetic interpretation of gases was submitted for publication to the Royal Society of London in 1848 by John James Waterston. His paper was rejected as nothing but nonsense. ... 

John James Waterston, 1811-1883, was a schoolteacher in India at the time of his independent invention of kinetic theory and was unable to get his work published. 

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