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From page 1... ...
As senior faculty members filed in to take their seats, sporadic shouts and cheers erupted from the simmering throng. But when university president Dr.
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At grand dinner parties on successive evenings, American politicians and foreign ambassadors, as well as technical men such as Alexander Graham Bell, accepted invitations to meet the celebrated visitor. In Rochester he was the guest of George Eastman, founder of the Kodak company, of which Kelvin was a vice-president and scientific adviser.
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Of particular concern to Rhees's audience was Kelvin's long-standing involvement in the development of systems to generate electric power by tapping the enormous energy going to waste every second as water plunged endlessly over nearby Niagara Falls. He talked of Kelvin's countless laboratory investigations, which underpinned the work of many pioneers of electrical science and technology.
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Here was a man, in other words, who had contributed profoundly to the development of fundamental physical principles and who had in addition turned those elementary insights toward practical ends. In 1902, when Rhees lauded his visitor, the creation of mechanical devices and technological instruments according to the principles of science was not yet a routinely accepted part of ordinary life.
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From page 5... ...
The company launched the line in 1918, to pay scientifically appropriate tribute to a man who had done much to develop the modern understanding of temperature and no doubt also to cash in on a still-famous name. Celebrity is notoriously fragile, of course, but scientific reputations do not normally wax and wane according to the whims of one era or the next.
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Tough! Kelvin struck me as the perfect illustration of a physicist inclined to lay down the law to lesser scientific disciplines, despite imperfect information and unproven assumptions.
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- r-rMy views began to change a few years ago as I was researching my account of the life and work of the Austrian physicist and atomic pioneer Ludwig Boltzmann. I encountered Lord Kelvin at a much earlier stage in his life, when he still went by the name he was born with, William Thomson.
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Then there was his connection to the transatlantic submarine cables, for which he developed the theory of undersea signal transmission, and his involvement with the British Royal Navy in devising new navigational instruments. There was the firm of Kelvin and White, a Glasgow maker of telegraph equipment, scientific and laboratory instruments, and, toward the end of the 1 9th century, household electricity meters.
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From page 9... ...
In lanuary 1883 he delivered a lecture to the Institution of Civil Engineers in London in which he dilated on the seemingly dreary but actually, as we shall see, contentious and intricate matter of the standardization of practical units for the measurement of electrical quantities. Characteristically, he struck out with enthusiastic digressions on subjects he had intended to dispose of in just a few sentences, and his lecture waxed on beyond the allotted time.
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