What was joule first name

The young James Joule was not a healthy child and a spinal weakness gave him a slight, though not pronounced, deformity. He did not attend school and was tutored at home where he made slow progress. Unsurprisingly, he was shy in company. Indeed, Joule was never able to command respect by the force of a strong personality and this may well account for his comparative obscurity outside the scientific community.

He needed the support of someone who possessed the gifts he lacked, but it was not until that he found that person in the shape of William Thomson, later Lord Kelvin — , who, although 6 years younger, had no trouble with self-publicity. Until then Joule struggled, publishing papers of major scientific importance but making almost no impact whatsoever.

The definitive account of Joule's life and work is the book by Donald Cardwell [ 1 ]. In Cardwell's description of Joule's formative years, he stresses the important influence of John Dalton — , a local teacher and natural philosopher with radical scientific ideas who was an early proponent of the billiard-ball atomic theory of gases.

From to , James and his elder brother Benjamin studied under Dalton, receiving twice weekly sessions on arithmetic, geometry, chemistry and physics. Joule's fascination with experimental work started in this period but he did not acquire his obsession with experimental precision from Dalton.

Given Joule's burgeoning scientific talents, it was a remarkable stroke of good fortune that a man of John Dalton's abilities was retained to tutor the two brothers. Dalton was a Fellow of the Royal Society and knew many of the leading scientists of the day. But he was also a scientifically independent thinker and it may well have been this characteristic which impressed the young Joule to such an extent that, when he was developing his own views about energy transformation, he was prepared to stand firm in print when almost every other natural philosopher in the world disagreed with him.

Nowadays, it is difficult to empathize with the scientific and technical culture of the early nineteenth century. In Britain, no science degrees were awarded and there were no professional scientific qualifications. Only a small minority of those who published scientific papers were gainfully employed in science and Joule himself conducted most of his experiments in the cellar of his house as a private individual. However, the development of the steam engine, most notably by James Watt in the late eighteenth century, was stimulating an interest, particularly among engineers, in the fundamental principles of the technology.

Natural philosophy was divided into the finished sciences Newtonian mechanics, planetary astronomy and optics and the progressive sciences botany, physiology, zoology, geology, chemistry, heat, electricity and magnetism. Electricity and heat were regarded as part of chemistry and thermal effects were thought to be due to the action of a subtle fluid called caloric which could be stored in bodies and transferred from one to the other.

The caloric theory of heat held sway throughout the late eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century. Virtually all natural philosophers accepted the concept that caloric could pass from one body to another by conduction and was conserved in the process.

This theory was given convincing credibility in The Analytical Theory of Heat by the French mathematician and physicist Joseph Fourier — [ 2 ]. Fourier's treatise was a mathematical tour de force introducing, as it did, the solution of the heat conduction equation using what are now known as Fourier series to represent arbitrary functions which could even have discontinuities. Fourier claimed that, given the thermal properties, state and form of a body, he could predict its thermal state at any time in the future and had thus essentially completed the scientific study of heat.

But, although the work was hugely influential, it was seriously restricted because it ignored the situation whereby heat was applied and mechanical work was performed in an engine. Given the huge success of the steam engine in powering the industrial revolution, this was a remarkable, indeed inexplicable, oversight on the part of Fourier and his contemporaries.

By the s, few scientists had questioned the caloric theory. The most famous of the dissenters was the American military adventurer and physicist Benjamin Thompson — , better known as Count Rumford. Rumford had a remarkable life.

He fought in the American War of Independence, moved to London where he received a knighthood from King George III, and then spent nine years as the minister charged with re-organizing the Bavarian army. Nevertheless, it was his famous cannon boring experiment which has secured his place in history [ 3 ].

Rumford observed that the frictional heat generated by boring cannon in the arsenal in Munich was apparently limitless. To demonstrate this he immersed a cannon barrel in water and, using a specially blunted boring tool, found that the water boiled in under 3 hours.

He then argued that this seemingly unlimited generation of heat was incompatible with the caloric theory and concluded that the only thing communicated to the barrel was motion. Rumford himself did not attempt to calculate the so-called mechanical equivalent of heat usually given the symbol J and his description was essentially qualitative.

Before the mid-nineteenth century, the term force was often used to denote what we now call work though clearly the unit foot-pound does not represent a force.

So, Rumford's data did give a value of the correct order of magnitude. Before the industrial revolution most mechanical power was generated by animals horses and oxen or by waterwheels. The efficiency of a waterwheel could be calculated using Newtonian mechanics. The power input was obtained from the water flow rate and the height the water fell from the millpond, and the power output from the height that a known weight could be raised against gravity in a given time.

The ratio of the two quantities gave the efficiency of the engine. Clearly, this type of analysis could not be used to calculate the efficiency of a steam engine. Sadi Carnot was a member of the French upper class and his father had been lucky to survive the excesses of the French revolution.

Carnot the younger received a good education in mathematics and physics but this can hardly explain the sheer brilliance of the short book he published in [ 5 ].

Few copies were printed at the time and the publication was completely overlooked by Carnot's contemporaries. However, in fewer than short pages Carnot provided an exposition of thermodynamics remarkably similar to the way it is taught to engineers today.

Reflections on the motive power of heat should be on the reading list of all practising thermodynamicists. It is the work of a truly revolutionary scientific thinker who was able to describe his concepts with crystal clarity and impeccable mathematical logic. On reading Carnot's memoir one is struck by his depth of understanding and the generality of his conclusions. It is all there! As a model of a steam engine, he conceived the generalized heat engine operating between a high-temperature heat source the furnace and a low-temperature heat sink the condensing water.

He then deduced that, for a given transfer of caloric, the maximum work output depends not on the working fluid, but solely on the temperatures of the heat reservoirs. He introduced the idea of completing the cycle because a steam engine is an open circuit device and further arguments led to the conclusion that the cyclic engine with maximum efficiency is one that can operate reversibly.

Taking an ideal gas as the working fluid, he then calculated how the state of the fluid changes as it passes around the cycle. This was followed by a discussion of the principles in the context of real engines and the realization that whenever heat is transferred from one body to another across a finite temperature difference there will be a loss in the possibility for producing mechanical work.

Carnot's achievements were staggering but the story does not quite end there. An inveterate note maker, Carnot recorded his thoughts on all manner of topics. He then proposed that heat was a form of motion of the molecules meaning the constituent parts of a body. No, undoubtedly; it can only produce a motion. Heat is then the result of this motion. Joule's experiments showed that heat could be generated by an electric current; however, this went against the prevailing theory of the time, known as the caloric theory.

In Joule presented his results to a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, in Cambridge, but contemporary anecdotes claim that he was met by a stony silence. Undeterred, he continued his experiments. In , believing he had compelling evidence, he submitted his paper to the most prestigious scientific group of all, the Royal Society… who refused to publish his work.

The accepted theory of the time, caloric theory, considered heat to be a material—a type of fluid that flowed from warmer to cooler bodies—while Joule's ideas posited that heat was a form of molecular motion and that it would continue without dying out. However, the very existence of atoms and molecules was not widely accepted until much later in the century. The atomic theory pioneered by John Dalton may seem inarguable to us now, but at the time that it was first suggested it was deeply controversial.

Joule's theory was a huge step for the scientists of the day to take; simply too huge for many of them. It was later found that Joule's rejection of caloric theory went too far, and later scientific theories, including those put forward by Lord Kelvin, sought to find ways to unify the two seemingly contradictory theories.

Another reason many of Joule's contemporaries were quick to reject his theories was because they simply didn't believe that he could carry out his experiments with the level of accuracy that he claimed. However, Joule had two secret weapons. One was his background as a brewer, which meant he had ways to measure much more precisely, as the finely tuned measurement of temperatures is critical to the brewing process. The other was John Benjamin Dancer, an exceptionally talented instrument-maker who created custom equipment for him featured in more detail below.

Some of Joule's belongings are currently on display in our exhibition Electricity: The spark of life , while others are held in the wider Science Museum Group collection:. In Joule successfully published his paper in a less prestigious publication, the Philosophical Magazine. Despite the establishment's indifference to his ideas, it was enough to bring him to the attention of scientists including Michael Faraday and William Thompson—later Lord Kelvin—and Joule's fortunes began to turn.

John Dalton was a true polymath who at the age of 15 was helping run a Quaker boarding school in Kendal where he taught everything from ancient Greek to hydraulics, alongside his brother Jonathan. An enthusiastic experimenter, he later turned his full attention to science and in put forward a new and deeply controversial idea: that chemical elements were made up of something called atoms and that the same atoms could be rearranged differently to form new substances.

Dalton was one of Joule's earliest tutors in Manchester. The experiment was repeated with whale oil and mercury, yielding results of a similar value. Although this experiment again made little impact, when he expounded a revised version to the Oxford meeting of the British Association, it had a better reception.

A young William Thomson [later Lord Kelvin] took up Joule's arguments, which were later developed into the concept of the conservation of energy, i. Thomson, rather than Joule, was to become a leading exponent of the new theories of thermodynamics, although Joule had played a major role in undermining the established science of heat, predicated on the idea of the conservation of heat.

In April Joule delivered a lecture 'On matter, living force and heat' at St Ann's Church reading room, Manchester, which outlined this concept of the conservation of energy. Professional recognition of Joule's work can came when "On the mechanical equivalent of heat", which reported a definitive value for the 'exchange rate' between heat and work, was communicated to the Royal Society in by Michael Faraday, and published in the Society's Philosophical Transactions.

After the s Joule played a lesser role in the emerging subject of thermodynamics, but he continued to experiment. He established, with William Thomson, the Joule-Thomson effect, by which the temperature of a gas or liquid changes when it is forced through a valve while kept insulated so that no heat is exchanged with the environment. This was to be used in the liquefaction of gases. In one of his last papers 'New determination of the mechanical equivalent of heat' he repeated his experiments for the mechanical equivalent of heat, with his findings agreeing with his earlier experiments [the figures were later revised by others].

Joule was elected F. He became a member of the Society's Council in and was recipient of its Gold Medal in , and the Copley Medal in Joule married Amelia Grimes in , the daughter of the Liverpool Comptroller of Customs; they had a son and daughter. His wife died following the birth of a second son who also died in In the ninth general conference on weights and measures introduced a new set of scientific units known as the Joule.

The collection has not been organized into series. Its small size, the lack of an obvious organizing principle, and its complex provenancial history, means that arrangement strictly by format or by provenance would not be appropriate. Allan Pate's unpublished "James Prescott Joule a bibliography of works by and about him" , revised describes nearly all the items in the current collection. The current listing is indebted to both these works, and the references used by Lowery and Pate are included with the item descriptions to facilitate identification.

Before the Joule manuscripts were transferred to JRUL, a number of items in the collection were identified as missing. These include the following items from the original collection: 1 Notebook pp. The published versions of these papers are reproduced in Joule's Scientific papers.

Lowery ref. Also "Experiments on condensing steam", "On the thermal effects of fluids in motion" and various magnetic and electrical experiments. The volume included several magnetized sewing needles, which were used in Joule's studies.

This was an unruled notebook containing general mathematical notes, exercises in book-keeping, and it is believed to have been compiled under the direction of private tutor.

Despite the concession, however, most publications have since given primary recognition to Joule, who passed away at his home on October 11, James Joule. James Prescott Joule experimented with engines, electricity and heat throughout his life. Category: Pioneers. More in this category: « Karl Jansky Jack Kilby ».