Kelvin

“ Every teacher of physics, mathematical or experimental; every man interested in the advance of science and the spread of knowledge, anxiously awaited news from the sick-room of the illustrious patient—news that was transmitted to the ends of the earth by the siphon-recorder invented by the dying scientist in the heyday of his life; and when the word came that Kelvin had breathed his last, that cablegram brought universal sorrow for the quenching of the brightest light of the age and the loss of the leading scientist, the model man and faithful Christian. ”

“ Matthew Kelvin shrugged his shoulders, but did not rejoin.
"But why call up such reminiscences?" said Olive. "I want to hear about yourself. A rising man like you, Matthew--a man born to fight his way upward--how is it that you are still unmarried? A rich wife would do so much to help forward your ambitious schemes!"
"My ambitious schemes, indeed;" said Kelvin, with a sly twinkle in his eye. "What has a simple-minded country lawyer like me to do with ambition?" ”

“ Another marvellous feature is the unheard-of energies which these fragments of radium set free in their break up. The powers of Nature in this respect astonish us as much as its extent in space and time.
Whether Lord Kelvin could read the future or not as to the drift of modern investigations on electrons and emanation "it would be shallow to believe that such men as Kelvin, with faculty quickened and outlook widened in the high air to which their fame raises them, really discerned no more than we, who have only their written words for authority, can perceive that they discerned. ”

“ We were close friends.”
“Kelvin—excuse me—you are getting to be impossible.”
“All right. Look at your watch. Time was made for unbelievers. There’s no convincing a sceptic but by foot-rule. Look at your watch.”
“I did, I confess—covertly—in the instant of distraction caused by Kelvin’s little son, who came to bid his father good night. He was a quiet, winning little fellow, glowing with health and beauty.
“Good night, Bobo,” said Kelvin, kissing the child fondly. “Ask God to make little Patsy’s bed comfy, before you get into your own.” ”

“ Kelvin was thoroughly startled, is to say no more than the truth. Olive was right. There would be a refinement--a subtlety--about such a scheme which his own scheme altogether lacked. But, would it not be a mean and dastardly advantage to take of an innocent girl like Eleanor Lloyd? He got up from his chair and crossed to the window, and then walked slowly back again and sat down without a word. He was a man whom circumstances had never before tempted to step out of the beaten track of morality. ”

“ If the laws of gravitation, and the decomposition of light by the prism, were the chief achievements of the immortal Newton; the magnitudes and motions of atoms, the theory of the age of the world, and oceanic telegraphy, were the principal discoveries of the immortal Kelvin.
A mere material universe, however, did not satisfy Lord Kelvin. There are such things as intelligence, volition, and emotion; the power to reason, the capacity to distinguish good and evil, and taste to admire the beautiful, which cannot be expressed in terms of length, breadth, and depth ”

“ Kelvin won't be long," he said, as he handed Gerald a chair and a newspaper.
Five minutes later, Matthew Kelvin opened the door and walked in. Gerald rose as he entered, smiled, and held out his hand. For a moment or two Kelvin was evidently at a loss.
"I seem to know your face," he said, "and yet you must excuse me if for the moment I fail to recollect where I have seen it before."
"Don't you recollect Jack Pomeroy and the Jolly Anglers' at Grasmere?"
"Of course, of course!" shaking him by the hand. "How one's memory fails as one grows older! ”

“ If, as we seem entitled to think, there is this kind of power-house available in the Sun, he need not be shrinking so rapidly—indeed he need not be shrinking at all. The calculations of Lord Kelvin are, in fact, rendered so much waste-paper, since they start with an assumption which may not be correct at all. ”

“ In 1899, at the age of seventy-five, Lord Kelvin resigned the Chair of Natural Philosophy, and retired, not to rest, but to investigate more vigorously than ever the properties of matter. One remarkable fruit of his leisure we have in his great book, the Baltimore Lectures, in which theories of light are discussed with a power which excites the reverence of all engaged in the new researches and which recent discoveries have called into existence. ”

“ Kelvin's theory of vortex motions, as applied to atoms and molecules, is of vast importance. It is a type of motion in a frictionless, incompressible, primordial fluid which might account for the known properties of matter.
Many of Kelvin's papers are only understood by expert mathematicians. There is hardly a department in physics which he did not make his own: molecular physics, electricity, dynamics, the theory of gases, heat, thermo-dynamics, the theory of energy, etc. ”

“ Notwithstanding a long life devoted to the study of mathematical and experimental physics, during which Kelvin unraveled many a difficult problem in electricity and magnetism and added many a beautiful skein to the texture of our knowledge in electrostatics and electrokinetics, that illustrious man, the acknowledged leader in physical science, made a public admission in 1896 which caused a great stir throughout the scientific world. It was on the occasion of the celebration of the golden jubilee of his professorship of natural philosophy in the University of Glasgow. ”

“ Kelvin to Olive, "to think that we are in the hands of such a nice clever man as Dr. Druce. He has had so much experience that I believe he can tell at a glance what is the matter with a patient. Experience, in the medical profession, is everything."
Sir Thomas and Lady Dudgeon drove over to see Mr. Kelvin a couple of days before their return to London. They were greatly concerned at his illness. As regarded Miss Deane, permission was given her to stay with her cousin as long as it might be necessary for her to do so. ”

“ In hydrodynamics also Lord Kelvin never lost sight of practical applications, even while pursuing the most intensely theoretical researches into the action of vortices or the propagation of waves. In his later years he worked out the theory of ship-waves with a power which has made more than one skilful and successful cultivator of this branch of science say that he was no mere mathematician, but a man who, like the prophets of old, could divine what is hid from the eyes of ordinary mortals. ”

“ On the other hand, there was a spice of romance about the affair that appealed to some hidden feeling, of whose existence she herself was hardly aware.
"Child! child!" she said in an aside to Eleanor, "if you had but given me your confidence! Two paupers! What are you to do? How are you to live? It's dreadful to contemplate!"
Kelvin's cheeks flushed as he listened to Gerald's words. He set his teeth and glared savagely out of his hollow eyes at his successful rival. Was it for this that he had humiliated himself by his recent confession? ”

“ There are life and mind; these no knowledge of matter has explained. "Proofs of intelligent and benevolent design lie all around us," said Kelvin. Things must be as they are either by chance, necessity, or design. Chance is out of the question, unthinkable. Grant that the properties of things, like those of numbers, for instance, could not be otherwise, have been eternally as they now exist—impossible as the supposition is—how came the elements of this world to be distributed as they are and in such proportions? Why gold rarer than iron, and iron than clay? ”

“ Kelvin was no soft-hearted swain who thinks the world is no longer good for anything because a certain pair of white arms refuse to coil themselves round his neck. It is true that he had told her of his wounds, but he had expressed no desire to be healed of them; he had given Olive no encouragement whatever to offer herself as his nurse. He had expressed himself very bitterly with regard to the person who had so wounded him, and Olive had done her best to intensify that bitterness ”

“ Kelvin. "Business must be given up. You have a career before you. After a time, perhaps, you will marry, and then----"
"Never, mother. I shall never marry," says Matthew very gravely.
The tide has been coming in very quickly, and a bigger wave than ordinary now comes creaming up nearly to their feet. They must move at once.
"It is time to go, the breeze is growing chilly," says Mrs. Kelvin. "You must tell me more of your plans and thoughts to-morrow." ”

“ Kelvin had not been without his own thoughts all this time as to the course he had taken at Olive's suggestion in keeping from Miss Lloyd the contents of the sealed packet sent him by Miss Bellamy. He was not usually a man whose mind vacillated with regard to any of his intentions or purposes. "There's no shilly-shallying about Matthew," his mother would often say. "When he sees his point he goes straight at it: fire and water would hardly keep him back." ”

“ So he came back inside the booth and looked around. A fat man in a swami’s costume was unconscious behind the carved chest the robot had indicated. His breath, plus a process of deduction, told Kelvin that the man had been drinking.
Not knowing what else to do, Kelvin called on the Deity again. He found suddenly that he was thinking about someone or something called Tharn, who was an android.
Horomancy ... time ... rapport ... no! Protective disbelief slid like plate armor around his mind. A practical robot couldn’t be made. ”

“ It was this:--The present Mathew Kelvin's father had run away with and married Miss Barbara Carstairs, an orphan niece of the late Sir Frederick Carstairs of Wemley, one of the chief magnates for twenty miles round. Miss Carstairs, to be sure, had not a penny that she could call her own, and was living the life of a genteel dependent at Wemley, when young Kelvin--who was passing backwards and forwards between Sir Frederick and his father, in connection with certain law business--persuaded her to elope. ”

“ It is true that the late Lord Kelvin raised difficulties in the way of the hypothesis of a direct magnetic action of the sun upon the earth, because it seemed to him that an inadmissible quantity of energy was demanded to account for such action. But no calculation like that which he made is final, since all calculations depend upon the validity of the data; and no authority is unshakable in science, because no man can possess omniscience. ”

“ Lord Kelvin had the happiness of enjoying good health throughout all the years of his long career, a happiness due in part to nature, and in part also to the simplicity, frugality and regularity of his life. ”

“ If she could but have comforted him! if she could but have laid his head against her bosom, and have kissed back the pleasant light into his eyes, and the sunny smile to his lips, as she remembered them in the days before the shadow of Eleanor Lloyd had ever crossed his path! But that might not be.
"Do you see much of Miss Lloyd nowadays?" asked Kelvin, presently, in as indifferent a tone as he could assume.
"I generally see her at breakfast and luncheon when she is at home. Not often besides."
"She is quite well, I suppose?"
"Quite well, so far as I know. Why should she not be?" ”

“ Led by such investigators as Lord Kelvin, they have become ever more and more insistent that the time demanded by the old uniformitarian and new biological speculator is not at their disposal. The publication in the seventh decade of the past century of Lord Kelvin's calculations, going to show that the sun had not been shining sixty millions of years, already gave pause to the reckless drafts which had been accustomed to be made on time; and the situation was rendered more and more acute by subsequent revisions of Lord Kelvin's work, progressively diminishing this estimate. ”

“ Kelvin cried.
“If you use the rapport device, your health, fame and fortune will be assured,” the robot said rapidly. “You will be as happy as any man of this era can be. It will solve all your problems—including Tharn. Wait a minute.” The creature took a backward step and disappeared behind a hanging Oriental rug that had never been east of Peoria.
There was silence.
Kelvin looked from his altered watch to the flat, enigmatic object in his palm. It was about two inches by two inches, and no thicker than a woman’s vanity-case, and there was a sunken push-button on its side. ”

“ I said. “You are a man of large property, and if you mean her to inherit it, she must not be a prey to fortune-hunters.”
“Oh, Kelvin is nothing of that sort,” he said, somewhat impatiently. “If anything, he is too unworldly; he loves my girl devotedly, and she fairly worships the ground he walks on. I am not surprised, and when you know him better, Cato, you will yourself yield to his many fascinations.”
That evening Miss Seafield asked me if her uncle had said anything with regard to Kelvin. ”

“ Kelvin by this time had been able to note his visitor's appearance--to note that his clothes, although originally well-made, were now worn and shabby: and Kelvin never liked a man who did not dress well; to note that there was not a single item of jewellery visible, that his scarf was without a pin, and his pocket minus a watch, and that altogether there was a decidedly impecunious look about his unwelcome Bohemian acquaintance. In Kelvin's estimation, a man who could not afford to carry a gold watch was hardly worth knowing. ”

“ With Lord Kelvin he collaborated in writing the well-known Treatise on Natural Philosophy. “Thomson and Tait,” as it familiarly called (“ T and T′ ” was the authors' own formula) , was planned soon after Lord Kelvin became acquainted with Tait, on the latter's appointment to his professorship at Edinburgh, and it was intended to become an all-comprehensive treatise on physical science, the foundations being laid in kinematics and dynamics, and the structure completed with the properties of matter, heat, light, electricity and magnetism. ”