MacTutor
John William Strutt
Times obituary
A GREAT MATHEMATICAL PHYSICIST. DISCOVERER OF ARGON.
We regret to announce the death of Lord Rayleigh, O.M., which took place on Monday night at his home, Terling Place, Witham, Essex. The great physicist was in his 78th year.
John William Strutt, third Baron Rayleigh, was born at Langford Green, Essex, on November 12, 1842. Entering Trinity College, Cambridge, as a fellow commoner in 1861, he graduated as Senior Wrangler in 1865 and won the first Smith's Prize of the year, the second being awarded to Professor Alfred Marshall. A year later, he was elected to a Fellowship at Trinity, but had to vacate it in 1871 when he married Miss Evelyn Balfour, sister of Mr. Arthur Balfour In 1873, on the death of his father, the second baron, he succeeded to the title, and in the same year he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. In 1879, when the Chair of Experimental Physics at Cambridge became vacant due to the premature death of Clerk Maxwell, he was generally regarded as the most suitable man to succeed him and was duly elected to the position, which carried with it the directorship of the Cavendish Laboratory.
At that institution he worked on a great revolution. Under Maxwell it had become a notable centre of research, but comparatively little had been done to develop its possibilities as a place of instruction for students. Lord Rayleigh set himself to change this state of affairs and to organize a system of practical teaching in experimental physics; and his success in this task was reflected in the increased popularity of the Natural Science Tripos, which in 1884, the year in which he resigned, attracted more than three times as many candidates as in the year when he was appointed.
In 1884 he served as President of the British Association in Montreal, when, for the first time in its history, it met outside the confines of the British Isles, and soon after his return from Canada he was elected one of the secretaries of the Royal Society, a position he held until 1896. In 1887 he became Professor of Natural Philosophy at the Royal Institution in succession to Tyndall, and held this position until 1905, when he received the highest honour open to a British man of science, the Presidency of the Royal Society. Three years later the University of Cambridge also bestowed on him the highest honour she can confer on her sons, by electing him her Chancellor in place of the late Duke.
EARLY RESEARCHES.
Lord Rayleigh's first scientific paper appeared in 1869, and in the following year he published an important memoir on the theory of resonance. In 1871 his reputation was made by a series of papers on optical questions, including the theory of the scattering of light by small particles and its application to explaining the blue colour of the sky, anomalous dispersion, the nature of white light, and reflection from crystals. In 1872 he discussed the copying of diffraction gratings by photography, and in 1877-78 he published the first edition of his classic treatise on the theory of sound. The five years he spent at the Cavendish Laboratory were extraordinarily fruitful, and during that period he continued a series of papers on "Acoustical Observations" which he had begun in 1877, published a number of observations in optics, with special reference to the spectroscope and the resolving power of optical instruments, and inquired into the conditions governing the instability of water jets.
Further, spite of demands made on his energy by administrative routine, he found time to carry out, aided by his sister-in-law, Mrs. Henry Sidgwick, most laborious and exact determinations of fundamental quantities in electrical measurement: the value of the ohm, the electrical motive force of the Clark standard cell, in the construction of which he introduced great improvements, the electrochemical equivalent of silver, and the specific resistance of mercury. His results formed the basis on which the legal definitions of the electrical standards of electrical motive force, current, and resistance were subsequivocally established by a Board of Trade Committee, of which he was a leading member.
THE DISCOVERY OF ARGON.
In his presidential address to the mathematical and physical section of the British Association in 1882, Lord Rayleigh expressed the opinion that the time had come for a redetermination of the density of the principal gaseous elements, with reference to the old theory of Prout, that the atomic weights of the elements are exact multiples of that of hydrogen, and he stated that he had already made some preparations for the task. These preparations took shape after his resignation from the Chair of Physics at Cambridge in 1884, and the work occupied his attention for the next 10 years or so. He first dealt with hydrogen and oxygen and obtained satisfactory values for them. He then turned to nitrogen, and here the results of several experiments were equally satisfactory, so long as the gas was prepared in one particular way. But it occurred to him that it might be well to carry out determinations using the gas prepared in another way, and then he encountered discrepancies which for a considerable time baffled explanation. He found that a given volume of nitrogen extracted from the atmosphere weighed more than the same volume obtained by chemical means from compounds that contain it. The difference was slight, only per cent, but it was greater than could be attributed to experimental error.
Various hypotheses were put forward to account for the anomaly, among them being the surprise that the difference was due to the presence of a certain quantity of nitrogen in a dissociated state; but ultimately he was led to the view that the gas obtained from the air was contaminated with a heavier, previously unknown, element. He noticed, as Cavendish had noticed more than a century before, that when a mixture of atmospheric air and oxygen was submitted to the influence of the electric spark, a small residue was left which refused to combine with oxygen, and this residue was finally recognized as consisting of a new element, the existence of which was announced to the British Association at Oxford in 1894. This new substance was named argon on account of its chemical inertness. ness, and Sir William Ramsay subsequently dis covered in it minute quantities of three other equally inert new gases—neon, crypton, and xenon—which, with helium, constitute a group of elements distinguished by their properties, or rather by their absence of properties, from every other kind of matter known to the chemist.
The researches already referred to sufficiently attest the range of Lord Rayleigh's work, but many others might be added to the list, in pure mathematics, electricity, the dynamical theory of gases, hydrodynamics, thermodynamics, the mechanical principles of flight, photography, the theory of the telephone, the distribution of alternating electric currents in conductors, the laws of the pressure of gases below atmospheric pressure, &c. Four volumes of his collected scientific papers, published under his own supervision by the Cambridge University Press in 1899–1903, contained no fewer than 272 papers. One of these, the article on "Wave Theory," which he contributed to the ninth edition of the Encyclopædis Britannica in 1888, constitutes a compendious, highly compressed treatise, which sums up his contributions to the theory of light.
CHARACTERISTICS OF HIS WORK.
Lord Rayleigh was marked out by the scope, the amount, and the quality of his scientific work A signal instance of his procision in small details, and of the important results that flowed from translating theoretical perceptions into inventions of everyday utility, his work was by no means without influence in the practical sphere. The part he took in investigations as one of the foremost British mathematical physicists of his generation. A leading characteristic of his work was its meticulous accuracy and finish-qualities, as apparent in the form of his mathematical analysis as in his spoken and written prose. He realized to the full
If he lacked the faculty so extraordinarily developed in Lord Kelvin of translating theoretical coriceptions into inventions of everyday utility, his work was by no means without influence in the practical sphere. The part he took in settling the standards of electrical measurement has already been alluded to. He was chairman of the Treasury Committee which recommended the establishment of the National Physical Laboratory, and after that institution had been founded he contributed to its success by presiding over its Executive Committee. He acted as Chief Gas Examiner under the Metropolitan Gas Acts, and he sat on the Board of Trade Committee which reported on the methods of testing gas.
SPIRITUALISM
In another sphere. Lord Rayleigh was always interested in the phenomena commonly termed spiritualistic, and one of his latest public appearances, less than three months ago, was as president of the Society for Psychical Research. In the address he delivered on that occasion, he recalled some experiments in hypnotic suggestion in which he took part at Cambridge in the 60s of the last century, and which convinced him of the possibility of influencing unwilling minds by suggestion. Later, he became interested in the doings of Home and other so-called mediums, and although he pronounced the results on the whole to be disappointing, he found some of the incidents difficult to explain.
With all his devotion to the highest problems of physical science, Lord Rayleigh did not disdain the practical affairs of everyday life. As the owner of some 7,000 acres of land, he showed a deep interest in the welfare of the agricultural labourers on his estate. These men received an annual bonus, which at one time was paid into accounts opened for them at the Post Office, but later into copartnership accounts with the estate, though under the modified scheme they continued to have their passbooks and remained free to draw out their bonuses in whole or in part when they were so inclined. Londoners are also familiar with milk-shops inscribed "Lord Rayleigh's Dairies."
Lord Rayleigh's honours were numerous. He held honorary degrees from Oxford, Cambridge, and Dublin, from Glasgow and Edinburgh, from Toronto and McGill University, and from Heidelberg. He received the English Order of Merit at its institution in 1902, and the Prussian Order Pour le Mérite in 1903, and he was an Officer of the French Legion of Honour. The Royal Society bestowed on him its Royal Medal in 1882 and its Copley Medal in 1899, and in 1904 he received the Nobel Prize for physics. He served as Lord Lieutenant of Essex from 1892 to 1901, and in 1905 he was sworn of the Privy Council. He is succeeded in the title by his eldest son, the Hon. Robert John Strutt, who was born in 1875 and who has made a name for himself in the scientific world through his research on radioactivity and other subjects. His younger son, Captain Arthur Charles Strutt, R.N., fought in the Battle of Jutland.
The funeral will be at Terling on Friday, at 4 o'clock .
_______________________________________________
Lord Rayleigh, whose death we record to-day, was one of the great Victorians, once an ornament and a pillar of nineteenth-century science. Senior Wrangler at Cambridge, Fellow of Trinity and a professor, Chancellor of his University, peer and agriculturist, he was a shining example of that old order of society which is now being weighed in an unfriendly balance. He was born to distinction and achieved greater distinction; born wealthy, yet capable of earning a competence in any social scheme that would include brain workers among producers. He discovered argon and was a successful purveyor of milk to the metropolis. His career and achievements, described in detail in another column, must give pause to those who would abolish the hereditary leisured class of England and transform the old universities into utilitarian training colleges. Rayleigh's scientific work was not of a kind that blazed into commercial success, and yet it contributed in no small measure to practical utilities His investigation of sound waves and his curiosity about the blueness of the skies led to conclusions that saved lives at sea and increased the range of foghorns. He was no dashing adventurer on the high seas of thought, but a patient scrutinizer, always hand in hand with his fellow workers. None the less, his deliberate studies of the density of nitrogen led him to the discovery of argon, and thus opened up new knowledge of the fabric of the universe.
A GREAT MATHEMATICAL PHYSICIST. DISCOVERER OF ARGON.
We regret to announce the death of Lord Rayleigh, O.M., which took place on Monday night at his home, Terling Place, Witham, Essex. The great physicist was in his 78th year.
John William Strutt, third Baron Rayleigh, was born at Langford Green, Essex, on November 12, 1842. Entering Trinity College, Cambridge, as a fellow commoner in 1861, he graduated as Senior Wrangler in 1865 and won the first Smith's Prize of the year, the second being awarded to Professor Alfred Marshall. A year later, he was elected to a Fellowship at Trinity, but had to vacate it in 1871 when he married Miss Evelyn Balfour, sister of Mr. Arthur Balfour In 1873, on the death of his father, the second baron, he succeeded to the title, and in the same year he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. In 1879, when the Chair of Experimental Physics at Cambridge became vacant due to the premature death of Clerk Maxwell, he was generally regarded as the most suitable man to succeed him and was duly elected to the position, which carried with it the directorship of the Cavendish Laboratory.
At that institution he worked on a great revolution. Under Maxwell it had become a notable centre of research, but comparatively little had been done to develop its possibilities as a place of instruction for students. Lord Rayleigh set himself to change this state of affairs and to organize a system of practical teaching in experimental physics; and his success in this task was reflected in the increased popularity of the Natural Science Tripos, which in 1884, the year in which he resigned, attracted more than three times as many candidates as in the year when he was appointed.
In 1884 he served as President of the British Association in Montreal, when, for the first time in its history, it met outside the confines of the British Isles, and soon after his return from Canada he was elected one of the secretaries of the Royal Society, a position he held until 1896. In 1887 he became Professor of Natural Philosophy at the Royal Institution in succession to Tyndall, and held this position until 1905, when he received the highest honour open to a British man of science, the Presidency of the Royal Society. Three years later the University of Cambridge also bestowed on him the highest honour she can confer on her sons, by electing him her Chancellor in place of the late Duke.
EARLY RESEARCHES.
Lord Rayleigh's first scientific paper appeared in 1869, and in the following year he published an important memoir on the theory of resonance. In 1871 his reputation was made by a series of papers on optical questions, including the theory of the scattering of light by small particles and its application to explaining the blue colour of the sky, anomalous dispersion, the nature of white light, and reflection from crystals. In 1872 he discussed the copying of diffraction gratings by photography, and in 1877-78 he published the first edition of his classic treatise on the theory of sound. The five years he spent at the Cavendish Laboratory were extraordinarily fruitful, and during that period he continued a series of papers on "Acoustical Observations" which he had begun in 1877, published a number of observations in optics, with special reference to the spectroscope and the resolving power of optical instruments, and inquired into the conditions governing the instability of water jets.
Further, spite of demands made on his energy by administrative routine, he found time to carry out, aided by his sister-in-law, Mrs. Henry Sidgwick, most laborious and exact determinations of fundamental quantities in electrical measurement: the value of the ohm, the electrical motive force of the Clark standard cell, in the construction of which he introduced great improvements, the electrochemical equivalent of silver, and the specific resistance of mercury. His results formed the basis on which the legal definitions of the electrical standards of electrical motive force, current, and resistance were subsequivocally established by a Board of Trade Committee, of which he was a leading member.
THE DISCOVERY OF ARGON.
In his presidential address to the mathematical and physical section of the British Association in 1882, Lord Rayleigh expressed the opinion that the time had come for a redetermination of the density of the principal gaseous elements, with reference to the old theory of Prout, that the atomic weights of the elements are exact multiples of that of hydrogen, and he stated that he had already made some preparations for the task. These preparations took shape after his resignation from the Chair of Physics at Cambridge in 1884, and the work occupied his attention for the next 10 years or so. He first dealt with hydrogen and oxygen and obtained satisfactory values for them. He then turned to nitrogen, and here the results of several experiments were equally satisfactory, so long as the gas was prepared in one particular way. But it occurred to him that it might be well to carry out determinations using the gas prepared in another way, and then he encountered discrepancies which for a considerable time baffled explanation. He found that a given volume of nitrogen extracted from the atmosphere weighed more than the same volume obtained by chemical means from compounds that contain it. The difference was slight, only per cent, but it was greater than could be attributed to experimental error.
Various hypotheses were put forward to account for the anomaly, among them being the surprise that the difference was due to the presence of a certain quantity of nitrogen in a dissociated state; but ultimately he was led to the view that the gas obtained from the air was contaminated with a heavier, previously unknown, element. He noticed, as Cavendish had noticed more than a century before, that when a mixture of atmospheric air and oxygen was submitted to the influence of the electric spark, a small residue was left which refused to combine with oxygen, and this residue was finally recognized as consisting of a new element, the existence of which was announced to the British Association at Oxford in 1894. This new substance was named argon on account of its chemical inertness. ness, and Sir William Ramsay subsequently dis covered in it minute quantities of three other equally inert new gases—neon, crypton, and xenon—which, with helium, constitute a group of elements distinguished by their properties, or rather by their absence of properties, from every other kind of matter known to the chemist.
The researches already referred to sufficiently attest the range of Lord Rayleigh's work, but many others might be added to the list, in pure mathematics, electricity, the dynamical theory of gases, hydrodynamics, thermodynamics, the mechanical principles of flight, photography, the theory of the telephone, the distribution of alternating electric currents in conductors, the laws of the pressure of gases below atmospheric pressure, &c. Four volumes of his collected scientific papers, published under his own supervision by the Cambridge University Press in 1899–1903, contained no fewer than 272 papers. One of these, the article on "Wave Theory," which he contributed to the ninth edition of the Encyclopædis Britannica in 1888, constitutes a compendious, highly compressed treatise, which sums up his contributions to the theory of light.
CHARACTERISTICS OF HIS WORK.
Lord Rayleigh was marked out by the scope, the amount, and the quality of his scientific work A signal instance of his procision in small details, and of the important results that flowed from translating theoretical perceptions into inventions of everyday utility, his work was by no means without influence in the practical sphere. The part he took in investigations as one of the foremost British mathematical physicists of his generation. A leading characteristic of his work was its meticulous accuracy and finish-qualities, as apparent in the form of his mathematical analysis as in his spoken and written prose. He realized to the full
The little more and how much it is,
And the little less, and what worlds away!
A signal instance of his precision in small details, and of the important results that flowed from it, is afforded by the care he took to clear up that discrepancy in the density of nitrogen which, trifling though it was, yet led to the discovery of argon and the opening out of a new chapter in chemistry. In many cases his services to science consisted in giving the final polish to theories already established in their main outlines, in searching out and frequently removing difficulties which had escaped the notice of previous investigators, in pointing to lacunae the filling up of which often showed the way to further extensions of knowledge. He combined a comprehensive grasp of fundamental principles with high mathematical powers and consummate experimental skill.
And the little less, and what worlds away!
If he lacked the faculty so extraordinarily developed in Lord Kelvin of translating theoretical coriceptions into inventions of everyday utility, his work was by no means without influence in the practical sphere. The part he took in settling the standards of electrical measurement has already been alluded to. He was chairman of the Treasury Committee which recommended the establishment of the National Physical Laboratory, and after that institution had been founded he contributed to its success by presiding over its Executive Committee. He acted as Chief Gas Examiner under the Metropolitan Gas Acts, and he sat on the Board of Trade Committee which reported on the methods of testing gas.
SPIRITUALISM
In another sphere. Lord Rayleigh was always interested in the phenomena commonly termed spiritualistic, and one of his latest public appearances, less than three months ago, was as president of the Society for Psychical Research. In the address he delivered on that occasion, he recalled some experiments in hypnotic suggestion in which he took part at Cambridge in the 60s of the last century, and which convinced him of the possibility of influencing unwilling minds by suggestion. Later, he became interested in the doings of Home and other so-called mediums, and although he pronounced the results on the whole to be disappointing, he found some of the incidents difficult to explain.
With all his devotion to the highest problems of physical science, Lord Rayleigh did not disdain the practical affairs of everyday life. As the owner of some 7,000 acres of land, he showed a deep interest in the welfare of the agricultural labourers on his estate. These men received an annual bonus, which at one time was paid into accounts opened for them at the Post Office, but later into copartnership accounts with the estate, though under the modified scheme they continued to have their passbooks and remained free to draw out their bonuses in whole or in part when they were so inclined. Londoners are also familiar with milk-shops inscribed "Lord Rayleigh's Dairies."
Lord Rayleigh's honours were numerous. He held honorary degrees from Oxford, Cambridge, and Dublin, from Glasgow and Edinburgh, from Toronto and McGill University, and from Heidelberg. He received the English Order of Merit at its institution in 1902, and the Prussian Order Pour le Mérite in 1903, and he was an Officer of the French Legion of Honour. The Royal Society bestowed on him its Royal Medal in 1882 and its Copley Medal in 1899, and in 1904 he received the Nobel Prize for physics. He served as Lord Lieutenant of Essex from 1892 to 1901, and in 1905 he was sworn of the Privy Council. He is succeeded in the title by his eldest son, the Hon. Robert John Strutt, who was born in 1875 and who has made a name for himself in the scientific world through his research on radioactivity and other subjects. His younger son, Captain Arthur Charles Strutt, R.N., fought in the Battle of Jutland.
The funeral will be at Terling on Friday, at 4 o'clock .
_______________________________________________
Lord Rayleigh, whose death we record to-day, was one of the great Victorians, once an ornament and a pillar of nineteenth-century science. Senior Wrangler at Cambridge, Fellow of Trinity and a professor, Chancellor of his University, peer and agriculturist, he was a shining example of that old order of society which is now being weighed in an unfriendly balance. He was born to distinction and achieved greater distinction; born wealthy, yet capable of earning a competence in any social scheme that would include brain workers among producers. He discovered argon and was a successful purveyor of milk to the metropolis. His career and achievements, described in detail in another column, must give pause to those who would abolish the hereditary leisured class of England and transform the old universities into utilitarian training colleges. Rayleigh's scientific work was not of a kind that blazed into commercial success, and yet it contributed in no small measure to practical utilities His investigation of sound waves and his curiosity about the blueness of the skies led to conclusions that saved lives at sea and increased the range of foghorns. He was no dashing adventurer on the high seas of thought, but a patient scrutinizer, always hand in hand with his fellow workers. None the less, his deliberate studies of the density of nitrogen led him to the discovery of argon, and thus opened up new knowledge of the fabric of the universe.
