Lord Kelvin: Beyond Degrees

William Thomson, Baron
Kelvin of Largs (1824-1907)
Painted by Hubert von Herkomer

It has been a little while since I wrote on someone who gave his name to a unit, so up this week is the eponym of the Kelvin, William Thomson, who is more often referred to as Lord Kelvin, because, for the last years of his life, he was Baron Kelvin of Largs. He did not inherit the title, but was actually the first scientist to be elevated to the House of Lords, and spent most of his life as William Thomson, although he was knighted in 1866, becoming Sir William Thomson. In addition to being the first Baron Kelvin, he was also the last, as he had no heir to succeed to the title. In just a bit of reading about him, I found out that Thomson/Kelvin was interested in all sorts of things, far more than just thermodynamics. These other interests include telegraph signals, navigational aids, and the age of the earth. I have become quite caught up in his and others work on the telegraph, so I initially intended to write this only on his telegraph work, but I have become so excited about telegraphy that I decided to give it a post all of its own. So this post will focus on Kelvin's work except for telegraphy, but look forward next week (hopefully) to a post all about the telegraph, and perhaps another post on Thomson.

So that I can skip on his scientific and engineering work, I'll give only a brief summary of William Thomson's life. He was born in Belfast and moved to Glasgow as a child. He studied at the Universities of Glasgow and Cambridge (where he was on the rowing team). At the young age of 22 he took a professorship at the University of Glasgow and never left, despite other offers. He gave many lectures, including a series at Johns Hopkins University. He also owned a yacht, the Lalla Rookh, built for him in the late 1860s, and several of his inventions were for improving navigation. He published more than 661 papers/communications and took out 70 patents. After his death in 1907, he was buried in Westminster Abbey next to Isaac Newton.

The Lalla Rookh
From The Life of William Thomson by Silvanus Thompson

The Lalla Rookh was a yacht of 126 tons. Thomson was known to take it out for much of the time between the semesters at the University of Glasgow, and sailed around Scotland and even farther afield, such as Lisbon. He also used it to entertain. In 1871 he planned a cruise to the Hebrides and West Highlands with Hermann von Helmholtz, Thomas Huxley, John Tyndall and James Maxwell, though it seems only Helmholtz was actually able to make it. Having the ship inspired twenty five different patented inventions. One of these was a device for correcting compasses when the ship had a metal hull. Another was an improved sounding (depth finding) device, using a wire rather than a rope such that measurements could be taken at speed.

The purchase of the ship may also have lead to his increased interest in fluid mechanics, which occurred in 1867, and was one of the subjects he discussed with Helmholtz on their journey in 1871. But his interest in fluid mechanics had a little remembered result as well--the idea of vortex atoms. Remember, the structure of the atom was not known in the mid-19th century. A common standard for atomic weights was not determined until 1860, and Mendeleev published the first periodic table in 1869. Even then, people didn't know what made up an atom. J. J. Thomson discovered the electron in 1897, and Rutherford's famous experiment which proved the existence of an atomic nucleus was not until 1909, after Kelvin's death, so the question of the nature of the atom was wide open. William Thomson spent considerable time developing the idea of vortex atoms, based on the descriptions of fluid motion made by Helmholtz, who had expanded descriptions of fluid motion to include more irrotational motion. This theory suggested that atoms are vortexes (such as smoke rings) in the ether that makes up space. By around 1883, Thomson began to feel that his theory was not sufficient to explain matter, but he had gotten other scientists thinking about the idea and furthered the field of hydrodynamics.

There is certainly more to be said, and I had hoped to say it, but hopefully that whets your appetite and you will go looking for more information on your own. The references should be quite helpful. And perhaps I will return to Kelvin at some point to talk about absolute zero, electricity, and the age of the earth. But if I try to cover them now, this post will never be finished.

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Miscellaneous Works by Thomson

• "On the Measurement of Electric Resistance", Proceedings of the Royal Society of London 11, 313-328.
• "Improvement in Reflecting-Galvanometers", patent number 209942, issue date November 12, 1878.
• "On an Absolute Thermometric Scale", Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science, 32 (January-June 1848) 313-317. In which Thomson suggests a temperature scale in which a degree change will provide the same amount of work regardless of the starting temperature.
• Mathematical and Physical Papers  (London: Clay and Sons, 1890). A compilation of his papers from 1841 to 1890.
• Treatise on Natural Philosophy (with Peter Tait) (London: Clay and Sons, 1883)
• Elements of Natural Philosophy (with Peter Tait) (1872)

References

• Gillian Cookson, "The Transatlantic Telegraph Cable", History Today 50, no. 3 (March, 2000) 44-51. A discussion of the difficulties and personalities involved in laying the first transatlantic cable, including both the failure in 1858 and the success in 1866.
• Robert H. Silliman, "William Thompson: Smoke Rings and Nineteenth-Century Atomism", Isis 54, no. 4 (Dec., 1963) 461-474. A detailed discussion of Kelvin's vortex theory of the atom and its place in 19th century scientific thought.
• Matthew Trainer, "The Patents of William Thomson (Lord Kelvin)", World Patent Information 26, (2004) 311-317. 
• University of Glasgow Library, "William Thomson, Lord Kelvin 1824-1907", online exhibition. Includes a wonderful collection of Thomson's correspondence with other illustrious scientists, including Joule and Maxwell.
• Silvanus P. Thompson, The Life of William Thomson, Baron Kelvin of Largs (London, Macmillan, 1910). A great biography of Thomson (or I assume it to be, from having read parts of it), with many letters written by him.
• Alex D. D. Craik, "Lord Kelvin on Fluid Mechanics", European Physical Journal H 37, (2012) 75-114. This appears to go in depth into Kelvin's papers and involves lots of equations.
• Alexander Russell, "The Eighth Kelvin Lecture", Journal of the Institution of Electrical Engineers 55, no. 261 (December, 1916) 1-17.
• Hasok Chang and Sang Wook Yi, "The Absolute and Its Measurement: William Thomson on Temperature", Annals of Science 62, no. 3 (2005) 281-308.

Erudite Euler

Leonhard Euler (1707-1783)

Up this week is Euler, the great mathematician. It is impossible for me to do him justice in this post, because of the shear volume of his work and my lack of knowledge about mathematics. If you would like to read more about him, please look at some of the articles in the references. These ones are particularly good.

I mostly know of Euler from two things-Euler's method, which was an approximation method I used in calculus, and Euler's formula, which could actually mean many things, but in this case I refer to his formula that relates exponential and trigonometric functions, e^ix = cos(x) + isin(x), and is perhaps seen more commonly in less scientific circles in the particular form where x = π, where it simplifies to e^iπ = 1. These are both definitely important, and I used the latter in about every other homework that I did this year, but Euler considered many more applied problems than this small sample size would suggest.

Leonhard Euler was the son of a minister and originally intended to study theology. Fields of study were different in the 18th century, though, and at the conclusion of his master's degree he gave a lecture comparing the natural philosophy of Newton and Descartes. At the University of Basel he studied, among other things, mathematics under the tutelage of Johann Bernoulli, who encouraged him to study mathematics more pointedly and was of much help in later years as well. As a young man, Euler competed for the prize question of the Paris Academy of Sciences, a competition open to the greatest scientific minds in Europe, and came in second. Not bad. In later years, he came in first twelve times. He applied to a position in physics at the University of Basel and failed, but then was invited to the Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg, where he was devoted mainly to mathematics. He stayed in St. Petersburg from 1727-1741. He was then invited to help found the Academy of Sciences in Berlin, Prussia. He did not get along well with Frederick II, though, and when rebuffed from the position of president of the Academy, returned to St. Petersburg in 1766 at the invitation of Catherine II, and stayed there until his death in 1783.

In setting down to consider the accomplishments of Euler, I found it interesting to note who had gone before. Nicholas Fuss, one of Euler's students, in his eulogy on Euler, said:

At the time when Mr. Euler entered into mathematics, nothing could be more discouraging. A mediocre talent simply could not expect to make a name for it and it was best to choose another career or to distinguish one brilliantly. The memory of the recently deceased great men that had been part of the past century and the beginning of ours was still particularly fresh in our minds. Hardly had Newton and Leibniz altered the face of geometry when they died and we had not yet forgotten the important services that the discoveries of Huyghens, Bernoulli, Moivre, Tschirnhausen, Taylor, Fermat and so many other mathematicians had provided to all the branches of mathematics.

Euler clearly chose the second option: "to distinguish one brilliantly". Rather than consider that mathematics had been exhausted, as one might think, or even that certain areas had, he pursued many different avenues and pushed mathematics in many new and old directions.

He tackled the field of mechanics in two volumes, introducing to it integral and differential calculus. He was also very interested in sound, and had written a thesis on it when applying for the position in Basel. But he returned to the subject in St. Petersburg, and extended his writings to include the emotions that sounds can evoke. There he also developed the Γ function (which gives factorials for positive integers, but can be applied to non- and negative integers as well), and the constant γ, called Euler's constant. He also developed the concept of the fuction, and the notation still used today of f(x). While writing on complex and novel mathematical ideas, Euler also wrote works on more basic subjects, like textbooks on arithematic for use in Russian schools, and Théorie complete de la construction et de la manœuvre des vaisseaux, a text for sailors on navigation. Other problems that he dealt with included optimal profiles for the teeth on gears, why disks (think pennies being spun) seem to spin faster as they fall down, the critical load for a rod to buckle, and the number of vertices, edges, and faces for polyhedra. In investigating these, he also often returned to a topic for many years after he first looked at it.

Something that undoubtedly helped his work was his prodigious memory. He was reported to be able to recite the entirety of Virgil's Aeneid (which, having read, I can assure you is no mean feat). It helps, of course, that he could read and write Latin. He was also very good at doing calculations in his head and remembering the results afterwards. This was vital to his work, especially in later years, since he lost the sight in one eye in 1735 and suffered from cataracts in the other, eventually losing his sight almost completely. That did not, however, stop his productivity, and he had his sons and others take dictation, or copy large letters from a slate.

For one with such remarkable skills, he also seems to have been quite humble and well liked, and passed up opportunities to quibble over who had discovered things first. He married twice and had 13 children, five of whom survived to adulthood. He had a fit of apoplexy while playing with one of his grandsons and drinking a cup of tea, and died a few hours later. Fuss spoke glowingly about him: how he dropped calculations for ordinary conversation, explained concepts at the level of the listener, did not hold

grudges, fought injustice where he saw it, and many other praiseworthy qualities. It has been exciting to see how a man could be at the top of his field, clearly pursuing topics that piqued his interest, and yet still  be praised as a humane, relateable, Christian man.

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References

• Marquis de Condorcet, "Eulogy to Mr. Euler", History of the Royal Academy of Sciences, 1783, Paris 1786, p. 37-68. A nice summary of Euler's life and work, free of equations and with some nice anecdotes.
• Nicolas Fuss, "Eulogy of Leonhard Euler", read at the Imperial Academy of Sciences of Saint Petersburg, October 23, 1783. Fuss was a student of Euler and a grandson-in-law. His eulogy is longer than Condorcet's, but more personal. If you are interested in what Euler was like as a person, skip to the end. Fuss paints a wonderful picture of a caring, Christian family man.
• Walter Gautschi, "Leonhard Euler: His Life, the Man, and His Works", SIAM Review 50, no. 1 (2008), 3-33. DOI: 10.1137/070702710. A relatively short summary of his life, providing both an outline of life events and some of his mathematical accomplishments. For a quick summary of some of his math, this is a good place to start, as this one actually includes some diagrams and equations.

The Elusive Wulff

A Wulff plot (the surface energies are given in red)
Drawing by Michael Schmid
and used under the GNU Free Documentation License 

I first ran into the name Wulff last year in my thermodynamics class. He gave his name to a method for constructing the shape that a single crystal will take based on the surface energies of different crystallographic directions. It is a clever construction, and that particular homework problem was probably my favorite of the whole year. So I decided to see what I could find out about Wulff, and I have found him very difficult to track down, so I put this post on the shelf. Then in winter quarter I ran into the name again in an x-ray diffraction class where we used Wulff nets, and I decided to track him down again. It proved no easier, but I did get farther! It does seem strange, though, for a man who's name is so often used, that there is so little information on him. He doesn't even have an English Wikipedia page! The first reason for confusion about Wulff is that he was Ukrainian, so there are different transliterations of his name, but worse than that, he went by two names! Georg Wulff was the name he used in German-language publications, and thus is the name that we are more familiar with, but his name in Russian (transliterated, of course) was Yuri Viktorovich. I did, at last, find a nice article on him in the Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography, and some information in one of my x-ray diffraction textbooks.

Image of a projection from Wulff's 1902 paper

Georg Wulff was born in the Ukraine in 1863 and studied at Warsaw University. In 1907, or 1908, or 1911, he became a professor (or teacher) of crystallography at Moscow University. Nobody seems to be able to agree. What is important, I think, is that between defending his dissertation and his death, he taught in various capacities at universities in Russia and the U.S.S.R.

He published two important papers in 1901 and 1902 regarding crystal structures and stereographic projections. They are both in German, so I don't know exactly what they are getting at. Hammond says that Wulff proposed the Wulff net in 1909, but there seems to be an image of part of a Wulff net in his 1902 paper. His 1901 paper introduced the principles of the Wulff construction, which is a graphical method for determining the faces of a crystal that are expressed based on the surface energy of the different crystallographic directions. This idea built on Josiah Gibbs' proposal that materials want to minimize total surface energy. Wulff himself did not prove mathematically why his construction worked, but it was proved by Conyers Herring (1914-2009) in the 1950s.

Crystal diagram from Wulff's 1901 paper

Wulff was also in communication with William Henry Bragg and his son, William Lawrence Bragg, English crystallographers. Wulff derived an equation for x-ray diffraction in 1913 that was equivalent to the one proposed the year before by the Braggs, and so some people at the time called what is now known as Braggs' Law the Bragg-Wulff Law. Wulff appears to have lost out on the name because he published second, and, more importantly, he did not follow up with as many advancements on the topic as the Braggs. After that, he appears not to have taken on any new areas of study and faded into obscurity, though not without leaving his name for students of thermodynamics and crystallography to stumble upon.

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Works

• G. Wulff, "Zur Frage der Geschwindigkeit des Waschsthums und der Auflösung der Krystallflächen," Zeitschrift für Krystallographie und Mineralogie 34 (1901) 449-530.
• G. Wulff, "Untersuchungen im Gebiete der optischen Eigenschaften isomorpher Krystalle," Zeitschrift für Krzstallographie und Mineralogie 36 (1902) 1-18.
• G. Wulff, "Über die Kristallröntgenogramme", Physikalische Zeitschrift 14 (March 15, 1913), 217-220.
• Correspondence with the Braggs, held at the National Archives in the UK.

References

• V. A. Frank-Kamenetsky, "Wulff, Georg (Yuri Viktorovich)." Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography. 2008. Retrieved May 03, 2013 from Encyclopedia.com.
• Christopher Hammond, The Basics of Crystallography and Diffraction, 3rd edition. Oxford University Press, 2009.
• John C. Haff, "Use of the Wulff Net in Mineral Determination with the Universal Stage", American Minerologist 24 (1940) 689-707. A nice description of how to use a Wulff net, with illustrations.
• Conyers Herring, "Some Theorems on the Free Energies of Crystal Surfaces", Physical Review 82 (April 1, 1951), 87-93. This may be the paper that proves the Wulff construction, but the date differs from that on the Wikipedia page (1953). In this paper Herring mentions that others have proven that other methods give larger surface energies than Wulff, but does not say that any prior work has proven the Wulff construction, nor without more knowledge of the subject, can I say whether this proves it or not.

Alexander Borodin: Chemist Composer

Alexander Borodin (1833-1887)

The topic of this post is at the suggestion of Melissa. Thanks for commenting! I enjoyed researching Borodin.

Alexander Borodin was a Russian composer and chemist. Those two seem to be very divergent, and in reading about him, it is interesting that I can find very little about if the two fields interacted in any practical way. In fact, his science appears to have gotten in the way of his composing. I had never heard of him, or at least thought I hadn't. It turns out I have heard some of his music. Here is an example, the Polovtsian Dances from the opera Prince Igor. I would suggest starting this and listening while continuing to read, though the ballet is quite good too.

Borodin was the illegitimate son of a Georgian prince, but he was born in Saint Petersburg and registered as the son of a serf. The prince did not forget him, though, and he was able to receive a good education. He was interested in both science and music, and wrote his first existing composition, a polka, at the age of 9. He attended the Medico-Surgical Military Academy in Saint Petersburg and started out as a doctor, though he became very interested in chemistry and studied with the chemist Nikolay Zinin, who apparently was a Russian chemist of note. Despite being at a medical school, Borodin was squeamish and therefore not well suited to being a doctor, so he continued his chemistry studies. Zinin is said (probably apocryphally) to have told him

Mr. Borodin, it would be better if you gave less thought to writing songs. I have placed all my hopes in you, and want you to be my successor one day. You waste too much time thinking about music. A man cannot serve two masters." (Podlech, from another source)

 Borodin did not give up "writing songs", but still managed to become Zinin's successor. After graduating in 1858, he traveled Europe for three years. He started in Heidelberg, working first with Robert Bunsen, though he ended up staying longer with Emil Erlenmeyer (and I've already written about them!). There he became friends with Dmitri Mendeleev (of the periodic table) and his future wife, the pianist Yekaterina Protopopova. He also attended the Karlsruhe Congress in 1860, an important milestone in understanding and standardizing atomic weights. He went with Yekaterina to Pisa and asked to work in the laboratory of de Luca and Tassinari (whom I had never heard of ). They had platinum retorts, which enabled him to work with corrosive substances. There he was able to make the first nucleophilic replacement of a halogen with fluorine, which was difficult because of the strength of fluorine bonds and fluorine's toxicity.

The Five. From left to right: singer, Mussorgsky,
Rimsky-Korsakov, Vladimir Stasov, Balakirev, Cui, and Borodin

Upon his return to Saint Petersburg, he became a professor, and also a member of The Five. The Five was a group of Russian composers in Saint Petersburg who were self-trained amateurs but wanted to write music that was authentically Russian. The other composers in this group were Modest Mussorgsky, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Mily Balakirev, and César Cui. Not a shabby bunch to be hanging out with!

Borodin continued his research and composing. One of the interesting things that happened in the next decade was a sort of dispute with August Kekulé. Borodin had been studying aldehydes, but Kekulé began research into their condensation in the late 1860s. It seems rather confusing who did what, but Borodin seemed to think that Kekulé was impinging on his territory. However, Borodin wasn't publishing much, so it was hard to actually make a claim. Eventually, Borodin ceded and returned to his work on amides. One of his most significant contributions in this field was a simple device to measure the amount of urea in animal urine. I have no idea why people wanted to use that, but contemporaries seemed pretty excited. After 1875, he did not publish any full papers. Instead, he spent more time on training students and advocating for women's rights. He gave lectures and provided special instruction for the female students studying medicine.

One wonders how Borodin juggled composing with science, and I found a great quote that expresses his difficulties.

In winter I can only write music when I am so ill that I don't give lectures, don't go to the laboratory, yet all the same can work a little. For this reason my musical friends, contrary to universal custom, always wish me not health, but sickness. (Letter to Liubov' Ivanova Karmalina, June 1, 1876)

Though his total oeuvre is small, the quality of his work is generally acknowledged to be good. He wrote two symphonies, some chamber music compositions, songs, and much of an opera. He worked on Prince Igor from 1869 until his death in 1887. Rimsky-Korsakov was concerned about it getting finished, and offered to help with it as much as he could. In the end, though, Rimsky-Korsakov and Alexander Glazunov had to finish it after Borodin's death, which unfortunately occurred at a fancy dress party.

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References

• Michael D. Gordin, "The Weekday Chemist: The Training of Aleksandr Borodin", in A Master of Science History, ed. Jed Z. Buchwald (New York: Springer, 2012), 137-166.
• Joachim Podlech, "'Try and Fall Sick...'--The Composer, Chemist, and Surgeon Aleksandr Borodin", Angewandte Chemie International Edition 49, 37 (2010), 6490-6495. DOI 10.1002/anie.201002023
• Michale D. Gordin, "Facing the Music: How Original Was Borodin's Chemistry?", Journal of Chemical Education 83, 4 (April 2006), 561-565. DOI 10.1021/ed083p561
• Leopold May, "The Lesser Known Chemist-Composers, Past and Present", Bulletin for the History of Chemistry 33, 1 (2008), 35-43.