John James Waterston
Encyclopedia
John James Waterston was a Scottish
physicist
, a neglected pioneer of the kinetic theory of gases.
sealing wax
manufacturer and stationer, a relative of the Sandeman family Robert
and his brother, George. 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 age nineteen, Waterston 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 earthwork
s. 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
.
, 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 expense, 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 molecule
s per unit volume
, N; molecular mass
, M; and molecular mean
-squared velocity
,
. He established the relationship:
.
He had been motivated to think of a wave theory of heat by analogy with the wave theory of light and some experiments by James Forbes and Macedonio Melloni
on radiant heat
. His statement that ... in mixed media the mean square molecular velocity is inversely proportional to the specific weight of the molecules has been seen as the first statement of the equipartition theorem
for translational motion. Waterston grasped that, while the kinetic energy
of an individual molecule with velocity v is ½mv², heat
energy
is proportional to temperature, T. That insight led him to derive the ideal gas law
:
.
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 had failed to make a copy for himself before submitting the paper to the Royal Society), 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 influenced 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.
, astronomy
, fluid mechanics
and thermodynamics
.
He left his Edinburgh home on the 18th of June and drowned in a nearby canal, possibly falling into the canal due to heat stress from his astronomical observation activities.
Scotland
Scotland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Occupying the northern third of the island of Great Britain, it shares a border with England to the south and is bounded by the North Sea to the east, the Atlantic Ocean to the north and west, and the North Channel and Irish Sea to the...
physicist
Physicist
A physicist is a scientist who studies or practices physics. Physicists study a wide range of physical phenomena in many branches of physics spanning all length scales: from sub-atomic particles of which all ordinary matter is made to the behavior of the material Universe as a whole...
, a neglected pioneer of the kinetic theory of gases.
Early life
Waterston's father, George, was an EdinburghEdinburgh
Edinburgh is the capital city of Scotland, the second largest city in Scotland, and the eighth most populous in the United Kingdom. The City of Edinburgh Council governs one of Scotland's 32 local government council areas. The council area includes urban Edinburgh and a rural area...
sealing wax
Sealing wax
Sealing wax is a wax material of a seal which, after melting, quickly hardens forming a bond that is difficult to separate without noticeable tampering. Wax is used to verify something such as a document is unopened, to verify the sender's identity, for example with a signet ring, and as decoration...
manufacturer and stationer, a relative of the Sandeman family Robert
Robert Sandeman (theologian)
Robert Sandeman was a nonconformist theologian. He was closely associated with the Glasite church which he helped to promote....
and his brother, George. John was born, the sixth of nine children, into a family alive with interests in literature
Literature
Literature is the art of written works, and is not bound to published sources...
, science
Science
Science is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe...
and music
Music
Music is an art form whose medium is sound and silence. Its common elements are pitch , rhythm , dynamics, and the sonic qualities of timbre and texture...
. He was educated at Edinburgh High School before becoming apprenticed as a civil engineer
Civil engineer
A civil engineer is a person who practices civil engineering; the application of planning, designing, constructing, maintaining, and operating infrastructures while protecting the public and environmental health, as well as improving existing infrastructures that have been neglected.Originally, a...
to Messrs. Grainger and Miller. His employers encouraged him to attend lectures at the University of Edinburgh
University of Edinburgh
The University of Edinburgh, founded in 1583, is a public research university located in Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland, and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The university is deeply embedded in the fabric of the city, with many of the buildings in the historic Old Town belonging to the university...
. He studied mathematics
Mathematics
Mathematics is the study of quantity, space, structure, and change. Mathematicians seek out patterns and formulate new conjectures. Mathematicians resolve the truth or falsity of conjectures by mathematical proofs, which are arguments sufficient to convince other mathematicians of their validity...
and physics
Physics
Physics is a natural science that involves the study of matter and its motion through spacetime, along with related concepts such as energy and force. More broadly, it is the general analysis of nature, conducted in order to understand how the universe behaves.Physics is one of the oldest academic...
under Sir John Leslie
John Leslie (physicist)
Sir John Leslie was a Scottish mathematician and physicist best remembered for his research into heat.Leslie gave the first modern account of capillary action in 1802 and froze water using an air-pump in 1810, the first artificial production of ice.In 1804, he experimented with radiant heat using...
as well as attending lectures in chemistry
Chemistry
Chemistry is the science of matter, especially its chemical reactions, but also its composition, structure and properties. Chemistry is concerned with atoms and their interactions with other atoms, and particularly with the properties of chemical bonds....
, anatomy
Anatomy
Anatomy is a branch of biology and medicine that is the consideration of the structure of living things. It is a general term that includes human anatomy, animal anatomy , and plant anatomy...
and surgery
Surgery
Surgery is an ancient medical specialty that uses operative manual and instrumental techniques on a patient to investigate and/or treat a pathological condition such as disease or injury, or to help improve bodily function or appearance.An act of performing surgery may be called a surgical...
and becoming an active participant in the student literary society.
At age nineteen, Waterston published a paper proposing a mechanical explanation of gravitation
Mechanical explanations of gravitation
Mechanical explanations of gravitation are attempts to explain the action of gravity by aid of basic mechanical processes, such as pressure forces caused by pushes, and without the use of any action at a distance. These theories were developed from the 16th until the 19th century in connection...
, accounting for action at a distance
Action at a distance (physics)
In physics, action at a distance is the interaction of two objects which are separated in space with no known mediator of the interaction. This term was used most often in the context of early theories of gravity and electromagnetism to describe how an object responds to the influence of distant...
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
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
at age twenty-one, where he worked as a railroad surveyor, becoming an associate of the Institution of Civil Engineers
Institution of Civil Engineers
Founded on 2 January 1818, the Institution of Civil Engineers is an independent professional association, based in central London, representing civil engineering. Like its early membership, the majority of its current members are British engineers, but it also has members in more than 150...
and publishing a paper on a graphical method for planning earthwork
Engineering geology
Engineering geology is the application of the geologic sciences to engineering practice for the purpose of assuring that the geologic factors affecting the location, design, construction, operation and maintenance of engineering works are recognized and adequately provided for...
s. The travel and disruption associated with his surveying work left Waterston little time to pursue his studies so he joined the hydrography
Hydrography
Hydrography is the measurement of the depths, the tides and currents of a body of water and establishment of the sea, river or lake bed topography and morphology. Normally and historically for the purpose of charting a body of water for the safe navigation of shipping...
department of the Admiralty
Admiralty
The Admiralty was formerly the authority in the Kingdom of England, and later in the United Kingdom, responsible for the command of the Royal Navy...
under Francis Beaufort
Francis Beaufort
Rear-Admiral Sir Francis Beaufort, FRS, FRGS was an Irish hydrographer and officer in Britain's Royal Navy...
. It was Beaufort who, in 1839, supported Waterston for the post of naval instructor for cadets of the East India Company
British East India Company
The East India Company was an early English joint-stock company that was formed initially for pursuing trade with the East Indies, but that ended up trading mainly with the Indian subcontinent and China...
in Bombay. The posting worked well for Waterston who was able to pursue his reading and research at the library of Grant College
Grant Medical College and Sir Jamshedjee Jeejebhoy Group of Hospitals
The Grant Medical College, Mumbai is a medical school affiliated to the Maharashtra University of Health Sciences, Nashik. Founded in 1845, it is one of the premier medical institutions in India and is one of the oldest institutions teaching Western medicine in Asia.The Sir Jamsetjee Jeejebhoy...
.
Kinetic theory
While in IndiaIndia
India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...
, he first developed his kinetic theory, independently of earlier and equally neglected partial accounts by Daniel Bernoulli
Daniel Bernoulli
Daniel Bernoulli was a Dutch-Swiss mathematician and was one of the many prominent mathematicians in the Bernoulli family. He is particularly remembered for his applications of mathematics to mechanics, especially fluid mechanics, and for his pioneering work in probability and statistics...
and John Herapath
John Herapath
John Herapath was an English physicist who gave a partial account of the kinetic theory of gases in 1820 though it was neglected by the scientific community at the time....
. He published it, at his own expense, in his book Thoughts on the Mental Functions (1843). He correctly derived all the consequences of the premise that gas
Gas
Gas is one of the three classical states of matter . Near absolute zero, a substance exists as a solid. As heat is added to this substance it melts into a liquid at its melting point , boils into a gas at its boiling point, and if heated high enough would enter a plasma state in which the electrons...
pressure
Pressure
Pressure is the force per unit area applied in a direction perpendicular to the surface of an object. Gauge pressure is the pressure relative to the local atmospheric or ambient pressure.- Definition :...
is a function
Function (mathematics)
In mathematics, a function associates one quantity, the argument of the function, also known as the input, with another quantity, the value of the function, also known as the output. A function assigns exactly one output to each input. The argument and the value may be real numbers, but they can...
of the number of molecule
Molecule
A molecule is an electrically neutral group of at least two atoms held together by covalent chemical bonds. Molecules are distinguished from ions by their electrical charge...
s per unit volume
Volume
Volume is the quantity of three-dimensional space enclosed by some closed boundary, for example, the space that a substance or shape occupies or contains....
, N; molecular mass
Mass
Mass can be defined as a quantitive measure of the resistance an object has to change in its velocity.In physics, mass commonly refers to any of the following three properties of matter, which have been shown experimentally to be equivalent:...
, M; and molecular mean
Mean
In statistics, mean has two related meanings:* the arithmetic mean .* the expected value of a random variable, which is also called the population mean....
-squared velocity
Velocity
In physics, velocity is speed in a given direction. Speed describes only how fast an object is moving, whereas velocity gives both the speed and direction of the object's motion. To have a constant velocity, an object must have a constant speed and motion in a constant direction. Constant ...
,
. He established the relationship:.He had been motivated to think of a wave theory of heat by analogy with the wave theory of light and some experiments by James Forbes and Macedonio Melloni
Macedonio Melloni
Macedonio Melloni was an Italian physicist, notable for demonstrating that radiant heat has similar physical properties to those of light.-Life:...
on radiant heat
Heat transfer
Heat transfer is a discipline of thermal engineering that concerns the exchange of thermal energy from one physical system to another. Heat transfer is classified into various mechanisms, such as heat conduction, convection, thermal radiation, and phase-change transfer...
. His statement that ... in mixed media the mean square molecular velocity is inversely proportional to the specific weight of the molecules has been seen as the first statement of the equipartition theorem
Equipartition theorem
In classical statistical mechanics, the equipartition theorem is a general formula that relates the temperature of a system with its average energies. The equipartition theorem is also known as the law of equipartition, equipartition of energy, or simply equipartition...
for translational motion. Waterston grasped that, while the kinetic energy
Kinetic energy
The kinetic energy of an object is the energy which it possesses due to its motion.It is defined as the work needed to accelerate a body of a given mass from rest to its stated velocity. Having gained this energy during its acceleration, the body maintains this kinetic energy unless its speed changes...
of an individual molecule with velocity v is ½mv², heat
Heat
In physics and thermodynamics, heat is energy transferred from one body, region, or thermodynamic system to another due to thermal contact or thermal radiation when the systems are at different temperatures. It is often described as one of the fundamental processes of energy transfer between...
energy
Energy
In physics, energy is an indirectly observed quantity. It is often understood as the ability a physical system has to do work on other physical systems...
is proportional to temperature, T. That insight led him to derive the ideal gas law
Ideal gas law
The ideal gas law is the equation of state of a hypothetical ideal gas. It is a good approximation to the behavior of many gases under many conditions, although it has several limitations. It was first stated by Émile Clapeyron in 1834 as a combination of Boyle's law and Charles's law...
:
.The publication made little impact, perhaps because of the title. He submitted his theory, under Beaufort's sponsorship, to the Royal Society
Royal Society
The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, known simply as the Royal Society, is a learned society for science, and is possibly the oldest such society in existence. Founded in November 1660, it was granted a Royal Charter by King Charles II as the "Royal Society of London"...
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 had failed to make a copy for himself before submitting the paper to the Royal Society), he rewrote the work and sought to advertise it elsewhere, attracting little attention other than from William John Macquorn Rankine
William John Macquorn Rankine
William John Macquorn Rankine was a Scottish civil engineer, physicist and mathematician. He was a founding contributor, with Rudolf Clausius and William Thomson , to the science of thermodynamics....
and Hermann von Helmholtz
Hermann von Helmholtz
Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz was a German physician and physicist who made significant contributions to several widely varied areas of modern science...
through whom it may have influenced August Krönig
August Krönig
August Karl Krönig was a German chemist and physicist who published an account of the kinetic theory of gases in 1856, probably after reading a paper by John James Waterston....
. The theory gained acceptance only when it was proposed by Rudolf Clausius
Rudolf Clausius
Rudolf Julius Emanuel Clausius , was a German physicist and mathematician and is considered one of the central founders of the science of thermodynamics. By his restatement of Sadi Carnot's principle known as the Carnot cycle, he put the theory of heat on a truer and sounder basis...
and James Clerk Maxwell
James Clerk Maxwell
James Clerk Maxwell of Glenlair was a Scottish physicist and mathematician. His most prominent achievement was formulating classical electromagnetic theory. This united all previously unrelated observations, experiments and equations of electricity, magnetism and optics into a consistent theory...
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 acousticsAcoustics
Acoustics is the interdisciplinary science that deals with the study of all mechanical waves in gases, liquids, and solids including vibration, sound, ultrasound and infrasound. A scientist who works in the field of acoustics is an acoustician while someone working in the field of acoustics...
, astronomy
Astronomy
Astronomy is a natural science that deals with the study of celestial objects and phenomena that originate outside the atmosphere of Earth...
, fluid mechanics
Fluid mechanics
Fluid mechanics is the study of fluids and the forces on them. Fluid mechanics can be divided into fluid statics, the study of fluids at rest; fluid kinematics, the study of fluids in motion; and fluid dynamics, the study of the effect of forces on fluid motion...
and thermodynamics
Thermodynamics
Thermodynamics is a physical science that studies the effects on material bodies, and on radiation in regions of space, of transfer of heat and of work done on or by the bodies or radiation...
.
He left his Edinburgh home on the 18th of June and drowned in a nearby canal, possibly falling into the canal due to heat stress from his astronomical observation activities.