Lord Kelvin : an account of his scientific life and work / by Andrew Gray.

Date:
1908
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Lord Kelvin : an account of his scientific life and work / by Andrew Gray. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    taken account of when the laboratories of the present time are contrasted with the much more meagre provision of those early days. The laboratory is now, as much as the lecture-room, the place where classes are held and instruction given in experimental science to crowds of students, and it is a change for the better. The arrival of James Thomson and his family at Glasgow College, in 1832, was remarked at the time as an event which brought a large reinforcement to the gens already inseparably associated with the place : how great were to be its consequences not merely to the University but to the world at large nobody can then have imagined. His family consisted of four sons and two daughters: his wife, Margaret Gardner, daughter of William Gardner, a merchant in Glasgow, had died shortly before, and the care of the family was undertaken by her sister, Mrs. Gall. The eldest son, James Thomson, long after to be Rankine's successor in the Chair of Engineering, was ten years of age and even then an inveterate inventor; William, the future Lord Kelvin (born June 26, 1824), was a child of eight. Two younger sons were John (born in 1826)—who achieved distinction in Medicine, became Resident Assistant in the Glasgow Royal Infirmary, and died there of a fever caught in the discharge of his duty and Robert, who was born in 1829, and died in Australia in 1905. Besides these four sons there were in all three daughters :—Elizabeth, afterwards wife of the Rev. David King, D.D.; Anna, who was married to Mr. William Bottomley of Belfast (these two were = the eldest of the family), and Margaret, the youngest, who died in childhood. Thus began William Thom- son's residence in and connection with the University of