London Days: A Book of Reminiscences

In the gathering dusk I descended the steps, as he stood in the open doorway, singing, and gazing towards the Corstorphine Hill.

CHAPTER VIII

LORD KELVIN

He sat on the lower stair, near the front door of his house, making difficult calculations and strange diagrams in a little book bound in green morocco. It would be five minutes before the carriage started, and he recollected that fact just as he reached the door and had put on his overcoat. Another man, almost any other, would have idled while the five minutes passed, and most men, especially busy men, would have fussed nervously at having to wait when they were ready. But Lord Kelvin, being the busiest of men, never wasted time by fussing, and never lost it in idling. Having five minutes he would solve a problem, so he pulled the memorandum book from his coat pocket, where he always carried it, and sat on the stair and worked.

He was seventy then, but his spirits were as young as those of the youngest of his students. They say that a man is as old as his arteries. The saying might have originated with him, if it ever occurred to him that he had arteries. But I am not sure that the customary anatomy was not, in his case, reinforced by an ingenious system of electrical conductors through which a mysterious energy was driven by his dynamic mind. Like all great teachers he was ever learning. But it would be difficult to say when he began to learn, for he was only ten years old when he entered the university! And he was thoroughly equipped for entering upon his student work even at that age. At twenty-two he was appointed Professor of Natural Philosophy, and he held that professorship for the rest of his life!

Lord Kelvin was the greatest master of natural science in the nineteenth century. The twentieth century has not, thus far, produced his superior. He was born in 1824, he died in 1908. It was my privilege to know him during the last fifteen years of his life. A kinder man, one more considerate of the abysmal ignorance of the fellow creatures with whom he came into contact, could not be imagined. He was a plain Scotsman without a pose, without even a Scottish pose, and it would be difficult, maybe impossible, to find a better embodiment of life than that. Scottish he was, though born in Ireland. And his fame was associated with that of Glasgow University which had the honour of receiving him into student life and which received the greater honour of his distinguished services for a period almost as long as the psalmist allots to the life of a man.

When he was eighty-three he outlined, as, probably, he had often outlined before, the plan of a boy's education. "By the age of twelve," said he, "a boy should have learned to write his own language with accuracy and some elegance; he should have a reading knowledge of French, should be able to translate Latin and easy Greek authors, and should have some acquaintance with German. Having learned the meaning of words, a boy should study Logic. I never found that the small amount of Greek I learned was a hindrance to my acquiring some knowledge of Natural Philosophy." Some knowledge of it! There, indeed, was modesty. For who had more knowledge of natural philosophy, or so much, as Lord Kelvin?

Is it necessary to say that he was not born to baronies? Surely, that much all readers may be presumed to know, some wiseacre will remark. But if one were painting a portrait instead of writing it, nothing would be more futile than to omit the subject's nose on the presumption that the public knew he had one. William Thomson, who became Lord Kelvin, was born in Belfast, the younger of two brothers. The elder brother was James, and he became famous as a professor of engineering. He died, however, some fifteen years before his brother. James was named for his father, and that James, the father, was born on a farm near Ballynahinch, County Down. His Scotch ancestors had planted themselves in Ireland in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. That farmer's boy had a huge hunger for knowledge. When he was eleven or twelve years old he taught himself, having no teacher to aid him, the principles of the sundial, so that he could make dials for any latitude. Also, from books which he contrived to get, he learned the elements of mathematics. By and by he began teaching in a little school. He taught in the summers, and in the winters he studied at Glasgow University, continuing to do so for five years, and then he was appointed a teacher in the Royal Academic Institute of Belfast. When his son William had reached the age of eight, the scholarly parent was appointed to the Professorship of Mathematics at Glasgow University, a position he held for twenty years. His scientific attainments were high, and his classical scholarship was distinguished. He educated his sons himself, until each was ten, and then sent each to the university. Lord Kelvin said to me once, when we were talking of those early days: "I had a great father."

The Kelvin is a little stream that winds through the grounds of Glasgow University. When Queen Victoria bestowed a peerage upon Sir William Thomson (she had knighted him many years before that) he chose for his title the name of the little stream by whose side he had spent his fruitful and illustrious life. His had been a life of labour, but it had been congenial labour. He had contributed vastly to the sum of human knowledge; he had invented useful things, to the amazement of pedantic men who think that science should remain with scientific persons and never be applied to the wants of the world; at least, not applied by the scientific discoverer of the principles or things. But with all his theories he was a practical man, and he prospered. That day when he sat on the stair for five minutes, and concentrated the training of sixty years upon the page of a notebook, we went to White's.

Once upon a time there was a White, a James White, who, in Glasgow, made instruments of precision which found their way all over the world. And so he became the maker of various things that Sir William Thomson, afterward Lord Kelvin, had invented. When White died, or retired, or possibly before that, Kelvin acquired his business and establishment and continued the manufacture of instruments of precision, the establishment being conducted under White's name, as before, and as possibly it may be to this day. Anyhow, we went to White's, where Lord Kelvin took me into his laboratory and showed me, among other things, his "Siphon Recorder" which was very interesting, albeit very puzzling to the non-technical mind. I asked him what it did. The technical descriptions I had read were rather baffling. His answer was: "The electric current in an under-sea cable, say an Atlantic cable, is very weak and weary. This reaches out from the shore, and helps it along, and writes down what it says." It was for this invention that he was knighted in 1866. He had connected the hemispheres.

He was one of the courageous and hopeful band that laid and worked the first Atlantic cables. Submarine telegraphy had been first employed in 1850 when a line was laid across the English Channel between Dover and Calais. But the scientific camps were divided in opinion about the practicability of working across thousands of miles of ocean-bed. One faction declared it "beyond the resources of human skill." Robert Stephenson said the project could end only in failure. Of course, the moneyed men were timid. Most of them were more than timid; they were scared. Faraday had found that the transmission of signals by submarine cable, on a line from Harwich to Holland, was not instantaneous. "The line leaked," said the financial men, "and most of the electricity that was pumped into it spilled into the sea. This does not occur on land lines," they said; "we will not invest."

William Thomson discovered and formulated "the law which governs the retardation of electrical signals in submarine lines." Whitehouse found that with a line 1125 miles long, a signal required a second and a half for transmission. Thomson's law showed that on a line long enough to connect Ireland with Newfoundland the transmission of a signal would require six seconds. This meant a dismally limited service. Only a few words could be cabled in an hour. The croakers were pleased. The men whose habit it is to say "I told you so" were joyous. The financiers would use their capital for other purposes. But Cyrus Field of New York found the money, and William Thomson found the way to utilize his own law to make success out of what had seemed to others to be defeat. He invented the "Siphon Recorder." Then the cable was laid under the Atlantic, and on August 17, 1858, Thomson's instruments sent and received this message:

"Europe and America are united by telegraph. Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace and goodwill toward men."

Two weeks later the cable broke. The world jeered and lost faith, according to its habit. Some called the cable undertaking "a swindle", some "a hoax", some a silly toy. These were thoughtful critics. Eight years passed, eight years of effort to make and submerge a cable that would endure. In 1866 the difficulties were overcome. The world congratulated itself and the men who had worked the "miracle." Lord Kelvin told me the story as if it had been a little affair of the day before. "There has been so much to think of since then," said he, "and there is so much more to be done! Harnessing Niagara is one thing." The men who plan things and do them were already planning for that, and as in the cable project, they called in Lord Kelvin to help.

"How far can we transmit electricity for power and lighting purposes?" they asked.

"Three hundred miles," said he.

They laid their plans for a much shorter distance, within a hundred miles, and they thought that Kelvin was dreaming. Years later, when power and lighting current had been successfully conveyed over much greater distances than Kelvin had suggested, an acquaintance of mine asked him: "Why did n't you tell us that electric power can be conducted over these greater distances? I thought three hundred miles was the limit."

"The limit is not known," replied Lord Kelvin. "In the case you refer to, I answered a specific question regarding a specific plan undertaken for commercial purposes. The limit was improved by time and circumstance, not by Nature. Ten years ago we could not build the machinery that is built to-day, nor, on a great scale, employ the conductors that are used to-day. My suggestion concerned the means then known, not the means that might be developed in a decade."

"Well, I lost a chance," said the would-be investor, who was also a Scot.

"So, I imagine, did the capitalists of Archimedes' day. You will remember that they failed to provide him with a fulcrum," said Lord Kelvin dryly.

Lord Kelvin, when a young man, became permanently lame as the result of a skating accident, but his lameness did not retard his physical activity. Sir William Ramsay, the celebrated chemist who had been a pupil of Kelvin, said that it "lent emphasis to his amusing class demonstration of 'uniform velocity' when he, Kelvin, marched back and forth behind his lecture-bench with as even a movement as his lameness would permit; and the class generally burst into enthusiastic applause when he altered his pace, and introduced them to the meaning of the word 'acceleration.'"

Ramsay's opinion was that Kelvin "was not what would be called a good lecturer; he was too discursive." Ramsay doubted whether any man "with a brain so much above the ordinary, so much more rapid in action than the average, can be a first-rate teacher.... But Kelvin never allowed the interest of his students to flag. His aptness in illustration and his vigour of language prevented that. Lecturing one day on 'Couples', he explained how forces must be applied to constitute a Couple and illustrated the direction of the forces by turning around the gas-bracket. This led to a discussion on the miserable quality of Glasgow coal-gas and how it might be improved. Following again the main idea, he caught hold of the door and swung it to and fro; but again his mind diverged to the difference in the structure of English and Scottish doors. We never forgot what a 'Couple' was—but the idea might have been conveyed more succinctly." Yes, and ten to one the receivers of it would have forgotten what a "Couple" was!

I heard Kelvin address the Royal Society in London while he was president of that body. He had invited me to come, and I was curious enough to see the most distinguished scientific body in the world learning something from the world's most distinguished mathematician, electrician, and natural philosopher. The hall in Burlington House was filled. Had an earthquake swallowed the hall then, the world would have been deprived instantaneously of dozens of men who were doing its thinking for it. The subject of the discourse was not thrilling, nor could the lecturer have been accused of an attempt to pander to popularity. The subject was "The Homogeneous Division of Space." There shot through the hour's talk a stream of descriptive phrases such as "tetrakaidekahedronal cells", "parallelepipedal partitionings", "enantiomorphs ", and their progeny.

The genial old gentleman on the platform would rest his weight upon his hands on the table, or the lecture-desk, and lean forward towards his audience, and tell some puzzling facts about nature's puzzles, pouring streams of numbers and their multiplications and divisions into their ears while they floundered in the mathematical deluge. He would see that he had them puzzled, that his mind was working too fast for them; he must have surmised it from the expressions on their faces, for while he announced theories, discoveries, and drew conclusions, they, with all their knowledge and experience, would look as blank or bewildered as schoolboys, and he would step back from the table and, with a winning smile, remark, "It's this way", or "After all, it's simpler than it seems", or "I think it would be demonstrated so", and turning swiftly on one heel would face the blackboard and draw upon it in strokes that were like flashes, a diagram which made it all so clear that his hearers chuckled, or laughed outright; then swiftly he would turn again and face them with that winning smile which seemed to mean, "See how simple it is!" Then they would applaud him, which is very difficult for the Royal Society to do.

Lord Kelvin's was the first house in the world to be lighted by electricity throughout. He utilized the current in every nook and corner, in attics and cellars, in cupboards, closets and wardrobes, long before anybody else had attempted to do so. This was when everybody else thought electric lighting a luxury, but his purpose was to prove it a necessity. That was his way. Whenever he acquired new knowledge he applied it forthwith to the betterment of the human lot. He thought that science for the sake of science, or scientists, was as stupid a formula as "art for art's sake." Cheese for cheese's sake would be quite as useful to mankind. Of what use was knowledge if it were not applied to the needs of man?

He was a yachtsman, but not for sporting purposes, or faddishness, or luxurious idleness. He loved the sea, and his yacht, a schooner named Lalla Rookh, enabled him to wrest from the sea some of its secrets. For twenty years he went sailing every summer, living aboard weeks at a time. He held the certificate of a master navigator. It was on board the Lalla Rookh that he invented his famous apparatus for taking soundings and his no less famous compass. These things became necessities for navigators.

The first pair of telephonic instruments that Alexander Graham Bell brought to Europe were presented by him to Lord Kelvin, who immediately put them to use by connecting his house with that of his brother-in-law and assistant, Doctor J. T. Bottomley. The first electrically lighted house in the world was the first in the old world to be connected by telephone for purposes professional, social, personal, and domestic. For how could Kelvin, who was always peering into the future, be afraid of new things? He peered into the past, too, for you remember how he startled the orthodox mind by his calculations regarding the age of the earth.

Lord Salisbury, just before he became Prime Minister for the last time (his long term of 1895-1902) was Chancellor of the University of Oxford and at the same time President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. At Oxford, in a memorable year, and in behalf of the University of which he was chancellor, he welcomed the association of which he was president, and he reminded his learned listeners that Lord Kelvin, whom he alluded to as "the greatest living master of natural science amongst us", was the first to point out that the amount of time required by the advocates of the Darwinian theory for the working out of the process of evolution which they had imagined "could not be conceded without assuming the existence of a totally different set of natural laws from those with which we are acquainted." Hot things cool. The once seething earth has cooled and is cooling. So many million years ago it must have been hotter than now by calculable degrees. "But if at any time it was hotter at the surface by fifty degrees Fahrenheit than it is now, life would then have been impossible on this planet."

Lord Kelvin assured us that organic life on earth cannot have existed more than a hundred million years ago. So if you believed in Archbishop Ussher's chronology, and niggardly dealt out to the earth an age of only six thousand years, or went so far as Professor Tait with his ten million, you had, by Kelvin's figuring, a tremendous margin to fill up somehow. Of course the orthodox jumped and squealed. But the geologists and biologists stamped and yelled. Some of them wanted more than Kelvin's stingy allowance; they wanted not one hundred million years, but hundreds of millions. And there was a pretty ferment in the camps!

Sir William Ramsay I have quoted on Kelvin's illustration, in the class room, of the term "acceleration." Kelvin maintained speed when he had got it up. Remember that he was lame, and consider his energy. He would dart at an object that stood a few feet from him, on his lecture-bench, use it for whatever demonstration was required, and then dart at another, or at the blackboard, or at the pointer, as if he were a busy bee extracting honey from the flowers. There was certainty about everything he did; no hesitation, no floundering, no hemming and hawing for a word, or the next act. His lameness merely lent emphasis to the fact that he was walking; it did not prevent his swiftness of movement. Across the grounds of the university I toiled after him like "panting time." He gave the impression of readiness for a race, and might challenge you at any minute. His gown was always streaming behind him, his mortar-board cap in imminent danger of blowing off in the breeze stirred by his advance. Well, he had raced the world many years and had always won.

Some great men are so impressed by their own greatness that their manner becomes ponderous and vast as if they lived in a belief that they cast shadows on the sun. Not so Lord Kelvin, who never seemed to think that great men thought him a greater than themselves. His manner was simple, gentle, courteous, and direct. He was easy to talk with, and yet he had no small talk. But it was not easy to answer his questions. There was never such a man as he for asking questions unless it were the Chinese Viceroy, Li Hung Chang. Whatever your profession, trade, interests in life, he would put questions that went to the roots of your matter and revealed on his part a greater knowledge of the problems involved than you dreamed existed. By tireless questioning he learned. But where Li Hung Chang turned the results of his questioning to his own benefit, Kelvin applied them to the good of the world. Yet when, in 1896, they celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of his professorship at Glasgow he was, I take it, the most surprised man in all the galaxy of the famous. The dear old gentleman with the domed head, the white hair, and generous white beard seemed to be asking himself, "What next? Why all this fuss and feathers?" But he was apparently genuinely pleased, too, for all the tributes bespoke honest admiration of achievement and character. Fifty-one learned societies, twelve colleges, and twenty-eight universities were represented. They were of all countries. That day the world, and all that was therein, lifted its hat to Lord Kelvin.

I may slip in here a quotation from Emerson. "In Newton," said Emerson, "science was as easy as breathing; he used the same wit to weigh the moon that he used to buckle his shoes; and all his life was simple, wise, and majestic. So it was in Archimedes—always self-same, like the sky. In Linnæus, in Franklin, the like sweetness and equality—no stilts, no tiptoe; and their results are wholesome and memorable to all men."

What Lord Kelvin had done, and was still to do, could not be described by any writing of less than encyclopaedic scope, and a knowledge as wide and deep as his own. Helmholtz may be quoted, as he has been quoted by many who attempted the larger task from a scientific standpoint. Helmholtz was his intimate friend. Helmholtz said: "He is an eminent mathematician, but the gift to translate real facts into mathematical equations, and vice versa, is, by far, more rare than to find a solution of a given mathematical problem, and in this direction he is most eminent and original."

Kelvin's first published paper was a defence of the mathematician, Fourier. His second was on "The Uniform Motion of Heat in Homogeneous Solid Bodies, and Its Connection With The Mathematical Theory of Electricity." I think he was eighteen then. He was certainly showing the bent of his mind. Fifty or sixty years later he said, in a presidential address to the Royal Society: "Tribulation, not undisturbed progress, gives life and soul, and leads to success where success can be reached." I do not know what his tribulations were, but they may have been the tribulations of defeat. He may have faced many defeats, but he won more successes. And the world was more concerned with scientific discoveries during his career than it had been in the time of Count Rumford and Humphry Davy, whose work in disproving that heat is a material body had been forgotten because nobody seemed to think it more important than curious. Sometime in the eighteen-forties James Prescott Joule ascertained the dynamical equivalent of heat, and settled the fact that heat is a mode of motion. Kelvin may be said to have leaped to the side of his friend.

Lord Kelvin was the first to appreciate the importance of Joule's discovery, and it was not long before he placed the whole subject of thermodynamics on a scientific basis. He put his conclusions into these easily understandable words: "During any transformation of energy of one form into energy of another form, there is always a certain amount of energy rendered unavailable for further useful application. No known process in nature is exactly reversible: that is to say, there is no known process by which we can convert a given amount of energy of one form into energy of another form, and then, reversing the process, reconvert the energy of the second form thus obtained into the original quantity of energy of the first form. In fact, during any transformation of energy from one form into another, there is always a certain portion of energy changed into heat in the process of conversion, and the heat thus produced becomes dissipated and diffused by radiation and conduction. Consequently there is a tendency in nature for all the energy in the universe, of whatever kind it be, gradually to assume the form of heat, and having done so to become equally diffused. Now, were all the energy of the universe converted into uniformly diffused heat, it would cease to be available for producing mechanical effort, since, for that purpose, we must have a hot source and a cooler condenser. This gradual degradation of energy is perpetually going on, and, sooner or later, unless there be some restorative power of which we have, at present, no knowledge whatever, the present state of things must come to an end."

He revealed the Electrodynamics of Qualities of Metals; the size of atoms, the horse-power of the sun; he determined the rigidity of the earth, the laws of the tides, made far-reaching discoveries in electricity, in vortex motion; it might be said of him that he took the universe for his field.

But in a chapter like this one is tempted to dwell too long on high achievements. What attracted one more than the achievements was the man, the kindly, sympathetic man who loved truth not celebrity, and work more than its rewards. He was ever the same, whether one met him in Glasgow, London, at sea, or in America, the same simple, straightforward, kindly character. He retained his mental activity to the end. He died at eighty-four, and seemed only to be departing on another journey in quest of truth and friendship.

On one of the afternoons when I sat with him in his study, within the precincts of the university, he said, "Patience, great patience is the need of this generation. It asks results before it earns them. Man is too wasteful of the resources he finds in the earth. The most of our coal is lost in smoke; the most of our heat is dissipated in the air. We need patience not less than courage in dealing with our problems." The study was lined with engravings and photographs. Darwin and Joule and Faraday looked down from the walls, and there were pictures of the cable-laying ships, the Hooper, and the Great Eastern. There were trophies of travel,—from specimens of sea-bottom along the African coast, to quite personal mementos of his lectures at Johns Hopkins University and other places in America.

A typical day of Lord Kelvin's was, in outline, this: After breakfast he would, at nine, face his class in the university and lecture for an hour. I heard him in such an hour lecture on "Kepler's Laws." He lectured to his class three days a week. After the lecture he would go to White's where he was perfecting an electric metre. After White's he would return to the university and lecture until one o'clock, say, on the "Higher Mathematics." Then home to lunch. After lunch consulting work on the lighting of a town by electricity. After that an hour in Lady Kelvin's drawing-room, taking tea with friends. Then work in the study over the laws governing the formation of crystals. Then dinner. Then calculations in the study, or writing a paper for one of the numerous societies of which he was a working member. In the intervals, with his secretary's aid, he would attend to his correspondence. And, if waiting for his secretary, out of a coat pocket would come the little green book, and into it would go notes, calculations, or diagrams, perhaps all three. That little green book would come out whenever he had a minute to spare, in his dressing-room, or on the stairs, or in a train, or a cab, wherever he happened to be, and the thought flashed. I often wondered what his thoughts were on the conservation of personal energy.

CHAPTER IX

TENNYSON

Freshwater is an overgrown village which sprawls about the western end of the lovely Isle of Wight. The meanness of much of its masonry is compensated by its remarkably wholesome air. Man has done his best to spoil Freshwater, but he has not wholly succeeded—yet. Give him time, and more radicalism, and he will make it one of the ugly spots of earth. I made its acquaintance in the early spring of 1882, and subsequently have visited it many times.

When I first made acquaintance with Freshwater, there was no railway within eleven miles, Newport being the terminus of the island lines which were as drolly inconvenient as they are now. The fiddling, amateurish railway, which has come in since then, has not only robbed Freshwater of its seclusion but has saddled parts of the rolling country with shabby streets of mean houses worthy of a Montana mining town. Towards the downs and the sea much of the old charm remains. About Farringford it is undisturbed. And it was at Farringford, that lovely estate, that Tennyson lived.

I had quarters in a house that faced the sea. And these quarters were mine whenever, in the thirty-six years since that delightful May, I returned to Freshwater. They are mine no longer. The house has become an hotel. Now, in the thirty-eighth year of my Freshwatering, I have lodgment elsewhere. The house that sheltered me so long is scarcely a quarter of a mile from Tennyson's Lane, and many of the poet's friends have stayed in it, and friends of Watts, for that great artist also lived in Freshwater, first at a house which is now called Dimbola, and subsequently at "The Briary", a charming home built by the Prinseps and facing Tennyson's "noble Down." In the rooms to which I have so often retreated, and where I so often watched the blue Channel dancing in the sunshine, there are, or were, many mementos of past days. Some of them were photographs, and, as any one who knows the Freshwater legends may guess, they were taken by Mrs. Cameron, the first of the artist photographers, and, in her day, the celebrator of all the celebrated who came to Freshwater to visit the poet.

Mrs. Cameron lived at Dimbola which is at the southeastern corner of the Farringford estate. "She were a concentric lady who wore velvet gowns a-trailin' in the dusty roads," as one old-timer described her to me. Her photography was not professional but amateur, and her skill in it was quite remarkable. So was her persistence. She would not permit a possible "subject" to escape without "taking" him or her. She was quite intimate with the Tennysons, and always called the poet by his Christian name. One day, while there was a smallpox scare about, she rushed to Farringford, with a stranger in tow, and finding Tennyson within, she opened the door of the room where he was sitting, and bidding the stranger follow, cried, "Alfred, I 've brought a doctor to vaccinate you. You must be vaccinated!"

Tennyson, horrified, fled to an adjoining room and bolted the door after him.

"Alfred, Alfred," Mrs. Cameron called, "I've brought a doctor. You must be vaccinated; you really must!"

There was no reply.

"Oh, Alfred, you 're a coward! Come and be vaccinated!"

She won.