Makers of Electricity

by Brother Potamian; James J. Walsh

Prof. Gray wrote: "In the physical laboratory, Prof. Thomson was both inspiring and distracting. He continually thought of new things to be tried, and interrupted the course of work with interpolated experiments which often robbed the previous sequence of operations of their final result."

It may bring a grain of consolation to teachers who meet with troublesome elements in the discharge of their duties, to know that Thomson, great and brilliant as he was, had similar experiences now and again. At one time a book of mathematical data would be removed from the place assigned to it, upon which he would give orders that it should be chained to the table; at others, there would be no chalk near the blackboard, and then the assistant would be solemnly instructed to have one hundred pieces available next time. On one occasion, he settled in a very novel manner the case of a student who insisted on disturbing the class by moving his foot back and forth on the floor. Calling his assistant, Thomson told him in a whisper to go down into the room under the tiers of seats, to listen attentively, and locate the wandering foot by its distance from two adjacent walls of the building. On his return to the lecture-room, the triumphant assistant gave the desired coordinates to the Professor, who took out his tape at once and measured off the distances, by which the outwitted offender was mathematically located. In obedience to orders, the latter rose and left the room, muttering a few graceful epithets as he went, in honor of Descartes, the founder of a system of geometry that could serve so well the twofold purpose of the detective and the mathematician.

It was the custom in Glasgow to open the daily sessions, morning and afternoon, with prayer, the selection of which was left to the discretion of the Professor. Thomson usually recited from memory the third collect from the morning service of the Church of England, to which he sometimes added reflections of his own for the spiritual benefit of his hearers.

In his teaching, Prof. Thomson was particularly insistent that his students should not bow their intellects in mute admiration before an array of mathematical symbols; but that, on all occasions, they should seek the physical meaning behind them. Writing on his blackboard one day dx/dt, he was not satisfied when told that it represented the ratio of the increment of x to the increment of the independent variable t (time); he wanted the student to say it represents velocity. He himself was so wont to look for the physical meaning of symbols that, like the prophets of old, he saw many things that were hidden from the eyes of ordinary mortals.

He had the rare gift of translating mathematical equations into real facts; and he strove all throughout his life, by word and writing, to purify mathematical theory from mere assumptions. He often said that he could not understand a thing until he was able to make, or at least conceive, a model of it.

He had a "keen mathematical instinct," as Prof. Silvanus P. Thomson puts it in a letter to the writer, an insight that "grew to see things." He often left matters in the dark for years, then returned to see them in the clear light of truth. At the age of sixteen, he wrote a mathematical essay on the figure of the earth; and at eighty-three, took it up again in order to add a note to the argument!

Thomson was discursive in his lectures, and was never able to boil the matter down to suit the taste and digestive powers of the ordinary student. The activity of his mind and its fecundity were such that new ideas, new problems, new modes of treatment were continually occurring, and with such fascination that he would leave the main subject to indulge in what often proved prolonged digressions. One of his bugbears was our system of weights and measures, which he denounced in season and out of season as "insane," "brain-wasting" and "dangerous." Occasionally epithets of a more caloric nature would escape the lips of the indignant Professor, who, as a consequence of his denunciation, had always to be indulgent to students who chanced to be shaky in the matter of Troy weight, avoirdupois weight or even apothecaries weight.

In later years, I heard Lord Kelvin at the Royal Institution, London, on some of his favorite dynamical subjects, such as the gyrostat, vortex rings and the like. However impressed by his keen eye, intellectual forehead, his mastery of the subject and wealth of illustration, I was no less impressed by his vivacity, his enthusiasm and the rapidity with which he could leave a train of thought and return to it again.

At meetings of the British Association, he always had something illuminating to say; but not infrequently, carried away by a torrent of ideas, he would indulge in a superfluity of detail, forgetting that other speakers had to be heard and other papers read.

The idea of connecting the Old World with the New by means of an electric cable laid on the bed of the ocean, seemed to most people in the 'fifties quixotic and utopian. Manufacturers said such a cable could not be made; engineers, that it could not be laid; electricians, that it could not be worked; and financiers, that if laid and worked, it would never pay. But with a Field to look after the financial interests of the scheme, and a Thomson to attend to electrical quantities, there was no tilting at windmills, and the utopian scheme became in due time the cable whose core pulsated with the news of the world.