Reprint of Papers on Electrostatics and Magnetism (Cambridge Library Collection - Physical Sciences)

William Thomson, Baron Kelvin (1824-1907), born with a great talent for mathematics and physics, was educated at Glasgow and Cambridge. While only in his twenties, he was appointed to the University of Glasgow's Chair in Natural Philosophy, which he was to hold for over fifty years. He is best known for lending his name to the Kelvin unit of measurement for temperature, after his development of an absolute scale of temperature. This book is a corrected 1884 edition of Kelvin's 1872 collection of papers on electrostatics and magnetism. It includes all his work on these subjects previously published as articles in journals including the Cambridge Mathematical Journal and the Transactions of the Royal Society. Kelvin also wrote several new items to fill gaps in this collection, so that its coverage of the state of electromagnetic research in the late nineteenth century is comprehensive.