William John Macquorn Rankine was a Scottish mathematician and physicist. He was a founding contributor, with Rudolf Clausius and William Thomson, to the science of thermodynamics, particularly focusing on its First Law. He developed the Rankine scale, a Fahrenheit-based equivalent to the Celsius-based Kelvin scale of temperature.
William John Macquorn Rankine
Drawing of a fatigue failure in an axle, 1843
Rankine in the 1870s
Table of contents to A Manual of the Steam Engine and Other Prime Movers (1859)
William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin, was a British mathematician, mathematical physicist and engineer born in Belfast. He was the professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Glasgow for 53 years, where he undertook significant research and mathematical analysis of electricity, the formulation of the first and second laws of thermodynamics, and contributed significantly to unifying physics, which was then in its infancy of development as an emerging academic discipline. He received the Royal Society's Copley Medal in 1883 and served as its president from 1890 to 1895. In 1892, he became the first British scientist to be elevated to the House of Lords.
Kelvin, c. 1900, by T. & R. Annan & Sons
The meander of the River Kelvin containing the Neo-Gothic Gilmorehill campus of the University of Glasgow designed by George Gilbert Scott, to which the university moved in the 1870s (photograph 1890s)
William Thomson's telegraphic syphon recorder, on display at Porthcurno Telegraph Museum, in January 2019
Lord Kelvin's sailing yacht Lalla Rookh