William Grylls Adams

William Grylls Adams (born February 18, 1836 in Laneast , Cornwall , † April 10, 1915 ) was a British physicist.

He came from a wealthy farming family, was the younger brother of the astronomer John Couch Adams and graduated from Cambridge University (St. John's College) in 1855. He was Professor of Physics (Natural Philosophy) at King's College London . First he was there from 1863 as a lecturer at James Clerk Maxwell and after his departure in 1865 his successor. In 1905 he retired.

Adams is known for his discovery of the direct conversion of light into electricity ( photoelectric effect ) in selenium (more precisely a selenium-platinum transition) with his student Richard Evans Day in 1876 (see History of Photovoltaics ). Willoughby Smith had previously shown in 1873 that the conductivity of selenium-platinum elements increased when exposed to light. At around 1 percent, the efficiency was still too low for economic applications, but the discovery was made at the beginning of the development of solar cells ( selenium cells ), which only made a breakthrough in 1954 at Bell Laboratories in the USA with the use of silicon.

He also dealt with dynamos and other areas of electrical engineering. He also looked at geomagnetism (as part of his association with the Kew Observatory) and conducted an investigation into whether oil-fired or electric lighting is better for lighthouses.

He was a Fellow of the Royal Society (1872) and in 1880 President of the Mathematics and Physics Department of the British Association . In 1875 he gave the Bakerian Lecture ( On the Forms of Equipotential Curves and Surfaces and on Lines of Flow ). From 1878 to 1880 he was President of the Physical Society of London.

He edited his brother's posthumous treatises and manuscripts (1896, 1901).

Fonts

• with Richard E. Day: The Action of Light on Selenium. In: Proceedings of the Royal Society of London . Vol. 25, 1876/1877, pp. 113-117, JSTOR 113462 .

Web links

• Biography on nahste.ac.uk