The mathematician and physicist William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin, (1824 1907) was one of Britain's most influential scientists, famous for his work on the first and second laws of thermodynamics and for devising the Kelvin scale of absolute temperature. Silvanus P. Thompson (1851 1916) began this biography with the co-operation of Kelvin in 1906, but the project was interrupted by Kelvin's death the following year. Thompson, himself a respected physics lecturer and scientific writer, decided that a more comprehensive biography would be needed and spent several years reading through Kelvin's...

Silvanus P. Thompson (1851 1916) was a physicist and electrical engineer. A professor by the age of 27, he taught at University College, Bristol, and the City and Guilds Finsbury Technical College in London, and was a leading expert on the newly emerging subject of electrical lighting. This work, first published in 1884, is considered a classic in the field. In this third edition (1888), Thompson explains that he has updated much of the work, and made an important amendment in Chapter XIV about the introduction of magnetic circuits into theoretical arguments about energy production. The book...