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More than 5000 entries on the history, culture and life of Britain (published in 1993 by Macmillan, now out of print)
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William Thomson
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(1824–1907, kt 1866, baron Kelvin 1892) Physicist who produced a stream of influential papers and inventions during his 53 years as professor of natural philosophy at the university of Glasgow, a chair to which he was appointed when only 22. Much of his work was in thermodynamics: he proposed in 1848 the absolute scale of temperature, later called the Kelvin scale; in 1852 he described with *Joule the effect now known by their joint names; and he formulated in the same year the second law of thermodynamics (an idea developed at the same time by Carnot in France and Clausius in Germany).
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He was also much involved in magnetism and electricity, the two fields in which he introduced many of his most useful inventions. He was responsible for major improvements in basic nautical equipment (including the compass, tide gauge and sounding apparatus), and he made important contributions to the development of telegraphy, particularly in the advances which made possible the laying of the great submarine cables.
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