William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin, (26 June 1824 – 17 December 1907) was a Scots-Irish mathematical physicist and engineer who was born in Belfast in 1824. At the University of Glasgow he did important work in the mathematical analysis of electricity and formulation of the first and second laws of thermodynamics, and did much to unify the emerging discipline of physics in its modern form. He worked closely with mathematics professor Hugh Blackburn in his work. He also had a career as an electric telegraph engineer and inventor, which propelled him into the public eye
First law of thermodynamics 1850 from Rudolf Clausius and from William Rankine; Rankine's statement is considered less distinct relative to Clausius'. A main aspect of the struggle was to deal with the previously proposed caloric theory of heat. In 1840, Germain Hess stated a conservation law for the so-called 'heat of reaction' for chemical reactions. His law was later recognized as a consequence of the first law of thermodynamics, but Hess's statement was not explicitly concerned with the relation between energy exchanges by heat and work. According to Truesdell (1980), Julius Robert von Mayer in 1841 made a statement that meant that "in a