Everything about John James Waterston totally explained
John James Waterston (
1811 -
June 18,
1883) was a
Scottish physicist, a neglected pioneer of the
kinetic theory of gases.
Early life
Waterston's father, George, was an
Edinburgh sealing wax manufacturer and stationer, a relative of the family of
Robert and
George Sandeman. John was born, the sixth of nine children, into a family alive with interests in
literature,
science and
music. He was educated at Edinburgh High School before becoming
apprenticed as a
civil engineer to Messrs. Grainger and Miller. His employers encouraged him to attend lectures at the
University of Edinburgh. He studied
mathematics and
physics under Sir
John Leslie as well as attending lectures in
chemistry,
anatomy and
surgery and becoming an active
participant in the student literary society.
At the age of nineteen, he published a paper proposing a
mechanical explanation of gravitation, accounting for
action at a distance in terms of colliding particles and discussing interactions between linear and rotational motion that would play a part in his later kinetic theory.
Waterston moved to
London at age twenty-one, where he worked as a
railroad surveyor, becoming an associate of the
Institution of Civil Engineers and publishing a paper on a graphical method for planning
earthworks. The travel and disruption associated with his surveying work left Waterston little time to pursue his studies so he joined the
hydrography department of the
Admiralty under
Francis Beaufort. It was Beaufort who, in
1839, supported Waterston for the post of naval instructor for cadets of the
East India Company in
Bombay. The posting worked well for Waterston who was able to pursue his reading and research at the library of
Grant College.
Kinetic theory
While in
India, he first developed his kinetic theory, independently of earlier, and equally neglected partial accounts by
Daniel Bernoulli and
John Herapath. He published it, at his own cost, in his book
Thoughts on the Mental Functions (
1843). He correctly derived all the consequences of the premise that
gas pressure is a
function of the number of
molecules per unit
volume,
N; molecular
mass,
M; and molecular
mean-squared
velocity,
.
The publication made little impact, perhaps because of the title. He submitted his theory, under Beaufort's sponsorship, to the
Royal Society in
1845 but was rejected. Referee Sir
John William Lubbock wrote
The paper is nothing but nonsense.
Unable to retrieve a copy of his paper, he rewrote the work and sought to advertise it elsewhere, attracting little attention other than from
William John Macquorn Rankine and
Hermann von Helmholtz through whom it may have infleunced
August Krönig. The theory gained acceptance only when it was proposed by
Rudolf Clausius and
James Clerk Maxwell in the
1850s by which time Waterston's contribution had been forgotten.
Later life
He returned to Edinburgh in
1857 to pursue his own novel physical ideas but met with unyielding neglect and discouragement from the scientific establishment. Neglect was exacerbated by his own increasing reclusiveness and hostility to the learned societies. He worked on
acoustics,
astronomy,
fluid mechanics and
thermodynamics.
He died near Edinburgh on 18 June 1883.
Recognition after death
As discussed above, Waterston's paper submitted to the Royal Society was rejected. Some years after Waterston's death,
Lord Rayleigh (Secretary of Royal Society at that time) managed to dig it out from the archives of the Royal Society. Finally, Waterson's paper was published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1892. (Please see below.)
Bibliography
- J.J. Waterston, "On the physics of media that are composed of free and perfectly elastic molecules in a state of motion, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London A, vol. 183 (1892), pp. 1-79. (Note: Waterston died in 1883 and his paper was published some years after his death.)
- Haldane, J. S. (ed.) (1928) The Collected Scientific Papers of John James Waterston, including a biography by Haldane.
- Brush, S. G. (1957) "The development of the kinetic theory of gases: II. Waterston", Annals of Science, vol. 13, pp275-282
- - (1961) "John James Waterston and the kinetic theory of gases", American Scientist, vol. 49, pp202-214
- Daub, E. E. (1970) "Waterston, Rankine and Clausius on the kinetic theory of gases", Isis vol. 61, pp105-106
Further Information
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