Lindley, D., Never at Rest, American Scientist, 96, 504-508
Never at Rest » American Scientist http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/id.4826,content.true,cs... BOOK REVIEW Never at Rest David Lindley KELVIN: Life, Labours and Legacy. Edited by Raymond Flood, Mark McCartney and Andrew Whitaker. 376 pp. Oxford University Press, 2008. $110. Lord Kelvin, especially in the last decades of his long life, was a genuine celebrity. Beyond his achievements in science, he had gained prominence for his forays into industrial engineering—his efforts were crucial to the success of the transatlantic telegraph cable—and had established himself as one of the earliest examples of what we might call a technologist, a man who applied scientific principles to commercial ventures. He made himself wealthy in the process, rose to the peerage and traveled widely. His visits to North America were noted on the front page of the New York Times and other newspapers, and reporters eagerly sought out his views—which he was equally eager to supply—on science, industry, commerce, even politics. On his death in 1907, at the age of 83, he was interred next to Isaac Newton in Westminster Abbey, to reside forever alongside perhaps the most supreme mind of science. But how quickly his star faded! To be sure, he died just as the emergence of radioactivity, quantum theory and relativity transformed physics, but still, we remember and celebrate such contemporaries of Kelvin as James Clerk Maxwell, Michael Faraday, James Prescott Joule and Ludwig Boltzmann. In his day, Kelvin was far better known than any of them, but in 1999, when the U.K. Institute of Physics polled its members for the top physicists of all time, Kelvin didn't even crack the top 30.
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