Frederick Thomas Trouton

Frederick Thomas Trouton.

Frederick Thomas Trouton (born November 24, 1863 in Dublin , † September 21, 1922 in Downe ) was an Irish experimental physicist. Trouton became known through the Pictet-Trouton rule , the Trouton-Noble experiment and the Trouton-Rankine experiment .

origin

Trouton came from a wealthy Dublin family and studied at Trinity College Dublin . As a brilliant student of engineering (e.g. still taking part in surveying work for planned railway lines as a student) and physics , he received the university's gold medal before graduation.

Career

He discovered the Pictet-Trouton rule that the entropy increase per mole of many liquids is the same when evaporating as a student by comparing measured values in textbooks.

In 1884 he became an assistant to George Francis FitzGerald , who was one of the few who took Maxwell's theory of electromagnetic waves seriously and immediately after the experiments of Heinrich Hertz became known (lecture British Association 1888) and encouraged Trouton to work in this area. Following the criticism of William Mitchinson Hicks (1901) of the Michelson-Morley experiment , Joseph Larmor suggested a test of the length contraction (an important part of Larmor's own electrodynamic theory) in a different way, which was first taken up by FitzGerald and, after his death in 1901, his student Trouton . Out of this, together with his student Noble, the Trouton-Noble experiment arose, in which Trouton originally intended to use a capacitor to gain energy from the movement of the earth against the "ether" (he expected a positive result). However, the expected effects were not found.

In 1897 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society . In 1902 he accepted the Quain Professorship for Experimental Physics at University College London , which he held until he retired due to illness in late 1914. He then lived in seclusion in Tilford in Surrey and from 1922 in Downe in Kent . He was paralyzed on both legs for the last five years of his life.

Web links

Trouton at University College London 1902–1914 (English)
Literature by and about Frederick Thomas Trouton in the WorldCat bibliographic database

Individual evidence

^ Andrew Warwick: The sturdy protestants of science: Larmor, Trouton and the earth's motion through the ether . In: Jed Z. Buchwald (Ed.): Scientific Practice. University of Chicago Press 1995, pp. 300-344.
^ FT Trouton, HR Noble: The Mechanical Forces Acting on a Charged Electric Condenser Moving through Space . In: Royal Society of London Series A Philosophical Transactions . tape 202 , 1904, pp. 165-181 . ( Digitized on Gallica ).

personal data
SURNAME	Trouton, Frederick Thomas
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	Irish physicist
DATE OF BIRTH	November 24, 1863
PLACE OF BIRTH	Dublin
DATE OF DEATH	September 21, 1922
Place of death	Downe

[1] Andrew Warwick: The sturdy protestants of science: Larmor, Trouton and the earth's motion through the ether . In: Jed Z. Buchwald (Ed.): Scientific Practice. University of Chicago Press 1995, pp. 300-344.

[2] FT Trouton, HR Noble: The Mechanical Forces Acting on a Charged Electric Condenser Moving through Space . In: Royal Society of London Series A Philosophical Transactions . tape 202 , 1904, pp. 165-181 . ( Digitized on Gallica ).