John James Waterston

John James Waterston ( 1811 - June 18, 1883 ) was a Scottish physicist . He is considered a pioneer of the kinetic gas theory .

Life and education

Waterston's father, George, was a sealing wax maker and stationery dealer from Edinburgh , and a relative of the family of Robert Sandemann and George Sandeman . John was born the sixth of nine children in a family rich in literature, science, and music. He was educated at Edinburgh High School before apprenticing as a civil engineer with Grainger and Miller. His employers encouraged him to attend lectures at the University of Edinburgh. He studied both mathematics and physics under Sir John Leslie and also attended lectures in chemistry , anatomy and surgery and became an active member of the student literature society.

At the age of 19 he published a pamphlet suggesting a mechanical explanation of gravity . The aim was to explain the phenomenon of remote action with the help of colliding particles and he discussed interactions between linear and rotational movements, which would play an important role in his later kinetic theory.

At the age of 21, Waterston moved to London , where he worked as a surveyor for railroad companies and became a member of the Institution of Civil Engineers. Traveling in connection with his surveying work left Waterston little time to pursue his studies, so he joined the Admiralty's Department of Hydrology under Francis Beaufort . It was Beaufort who suggested Waterston in 1839 for the post of trainer for the East India Company cadets. This position gave Waterston the advantage of being able to pursue his research.

Kinetic gas theory

While in India he first developed his kinetic gas theory independently of Daniel Bernoulli and John Herapath . He published his theory at his own expense in a book with the unusual title Thoughts on the Mental Functions ( 1843 ). He correctly derived all the consequences from his premises, for example that the gas pressure is a function of the number of molecules N, the molecular mass M, and the root mean square of the particle velocity . He got the relationship: ${\displaystyle {\bar {v^{2}}}}$

${\displaystyle P=NM{\bar {v^{2}}}}$.

He also thought about a wave theory of heat, analogous to the wave theory of light and some experiments by James David Forbes and Macedonio Melloni on heat radiation . His comment that "... in media mixtures the root mean square particle velocity is inversely proportional to the specific gravity of the molecules" was regarded as the first statement of the equipartition theorem . Waterston realized that the kinetic energy of a single molecule with velocity v is exactly ½ mv ² and that heat and energy are proportional to temperature T. These findings led him to derive the following law for an ideal gas :

${\displaystyle {\frac {PV}{T}}={\mbox{a constant}}}$.

However, its publication had little impact, perhaps also because of the strange title. He submitted his theory to the Royal Society in 1845 , but it was rejected. Sir John William Lubbock wrote " This work is nothing but nonsense ".

Unfortunately, Waterston hadn't made a copy of his work, so he had to rewrite it and try to publish it elsewhere. This work aroused little interest from William John Macquorn Rankine and Hermann von Helmholtz , through which it may have influenced August Krönig .

The kinetic gas theory itself was only accepted when Rudolf Clausius and James Clerk Maxwell published their work in the 1850s - by then, Waterston's contributions had already been forgotten.

Last stations

Waterston returned to Edinburgh in 1857 and pursued his own physical ideas, but only encountered the rejection and disregard of the scientific establishment. This rejection was exacerbated by his own growing hermitism and hostility to learned society.

He was still working on topics such as acoustics , astronomy , fluid mechanics and thermodynamics . Eventually he died near Edinburgh in 1883.

bibliography

• JSHaldane The Collected Scientific Papers of John James Waterston , 1928
• Stephen Brush The development of the kinetic theory of gases: II. Waterston , Annals of Science, Volume 13, 1957, pp. 275-282
• Brush John James Waterston and the kinetic theory of gases , American Scientist, Vol. 49, 1961, pp. 202-214
• Brush The kind of motion we call heat , North Holland 1976
• EEDaub Waterston, Rankine and Clausius on the kinetic theory of gases , Isis, Vol. 61, 1970, pp. 105-106