Lord Kelvin became a Glasgow professor at 22 and stayed for 53 years
William Thomson began university at ten, took a professor's chair at 22, and pinned absolute zero near minus 273.15 degrees Celsius. Along the way he helped lay the transatlantic telegraph, earned a knighthood, and became the first scientist raised to the House of Lords, taking his title from a Glasgow river.
Born in Belfast on 26 June 1824, Thomson lost his mother when he was six. His father, a mathematics teacher, moved the family to Glasgow after winning a university chair, and William enrolled there in 1834, a normal age at the time. At twelve he won a prize for translating Lucian from Ancient Greek. As a teenager he fell for Joseph Fourier's theory of heat, which British mathematicians still looked down on, and defended it in print under the pen name P.Q.R.
At Peterhouse, Cambridge, he rowed well enough to win the Colquhoun Sculls in 1843 and graduated second wrangler in 1845, also taking the first Smith's Prize for original research. One examiner reportedly joked that he and a colleague were barely fit to mend the young man's pens. That same year he gave mathematical shape to Michael Faraday's notion that electrical forces act through a medium, and his encouragement nudged Faraday toward discovering that magnetism can affect light.
In 1846 Glasgow gave him its chair of natural philosophy, and he never left, turning down offers from famous universities until retiring in 1899. Hearing James Joule argue in 1847 that heat and work are interchangeable, he was doubtful, still loyal to Sadi Carnot's older picture. In 1848 he proposed a temperature scale independent of any particular substance, and over the next few years came round to Joule, helping frame the first and second laws of thermodynamics and even imagining an eventual heat death of the universe.
Fame and money came from telegraphy. Queen Victoria knighted him in 1866 for the Atlantic cable, and he improved the unreliable ship's compass. He received the Royal Society's Copley Medal in 1883, presided over the society from 1890 to 1895, and in 1892 became Baron Kelvin, named after the River Kelvin by his laboratory. He died in 1907 at Netherhall, his mansion in Largs, and the Hunterian Museum still displays his instruments and his pipe.
Source: Lord Kelvin
