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
Laws of thermodynamics to thermodynamics and were clearly stated in the nineteenth century, the desire to explicitly number the above law was not widely felt until Fowler and Guggenheim did so in the 1930s, long after the first, second, and third law were already widely understood and recognized. Hence it was numbered the zeroth law. The importance of the law as a foundation to the earlier laws is that it allows the definition of temperature in a non-circular way without reference to entropy, its conjugate variable. Such a temperature definition is said to be 'empirical'. The first law of thermodynamics may be stated