Abstract
Maxwell’s health began to fail early in 1879, and he died in Cambridge on November 5, 1879 at the age of 48. For the Cambridge scientific community, his death was a double calamity: not only had they lost a great scientist, but his passing also threatened the future of the Cavendish Laboratory. According to the regulations of his professorship, the chair was to “terminate with the tenure of office of the Professor first elected, unless the University by Grace of the Senate shall decide that the Professorship shall be continued.” On November 20, the Senate passed a resolution that “the Professorship of Experimental Physics, established by Grace of the Senate Feb. 9, 1871, be continued, subject to the regulations then enacted so far they are now applicable.”3 Cambridge leaders concerned with physical science were eager to attract to the position a worthy successor to Maxwell.
To myself they were perhaps the happiest I ever spent.
R. T. Glazebrookl
The remarkable credibility of this landed aristocrat, wrangler, administrator and physicist first emerged during a brief but decisive period of work on the standard unit and value of electrical resistance between 1879 and 1884.
Simon Schaffer2
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Reference
A History of the Cavendish Laboratory, 74.
Simon Schaffer, “Rayleigh and the Establishment of Electrical Standards,” European Journal of Physics 15 (1994): 227–285 on 277.
CUR (18 November 1879): 121.
See Scientific Papers by John William Strutt, Baron Rayleigh, 6 vols., reprinted (New York: Dover, 1964), vol. 1.
J.J. Thomson et al., “Lord Rayleigh. O. M., F. R. S. (a collective obituary),” Nature 103 (1919): 365–369 on 365 (J.J. Thomson).
Ibid., 366 and 368 (R. T. Glazebrook). Rayleigh’s interest in experimentation went back to his Cambridge years of the 1860s. He attended Stokes’ lectures and tried to learn experimental skills from him but was soon disappointed. He became a self-trained experimentalist.
Strutt, Life of Rayleigh, 48–49. In his letter from Cambridge, Rayleigh said, “Some people thought that if [Maxwell] would not, I was the proper person. It is now I believe nearly certain that he will come, and so I am relieved of having to make a difficult decision.”
Ibid., 99–100.
Ibid., 100–101.
Ibid., 99–100.
CUR (3 June 1879): 676. Maxwell’s annual report of 1879 gives an idea of the number of students attending the Demonstrator’s elementary lectures: for the 1878 Easter term, lectures on Electrostatics and the Elements of Thermo-electricity and Voltaic Electricity, a class of 33; for the 1878 Michaelmas term, lectures on Voltaic Electricity and Electro-magnetism, including the principal electrical measurements required in telegraphic engineering, and on Experimental Mechanics, two classes, together numbering 18; for the 1879 Lent term, lectures on Heat, and on Hydrostatics, two classes, together numbering 42.
CUR (15 March 1881): 407; (29 March 1881): 438. It is interesting to note that the official recognition of the establishment of the second demonstratorship by the Senate was long delayed.
CUR (2 March 1880): 329.
A History of the Cavendish Laboratory,47–48.
CUR (5 October 1875): 15–17. To meet both oral and practical examinations, hydrostatics, heat, and electricity were recommended subjects.
CUR (28 October 1879): 64–65; a slightly amended report was published in the next year (CUR (10 February 1880): 280–282).
CUR (12 December 1882): 225.
See CUR (27 February 1883): 423–424, and Wilson “Experimentalists among Mathematicians,” 369–371. The more mathematical the MT became, the more central the NST was to physics education. The combination of the MT and the NST then became the major way to train Cambridge physicists: Wilson pointed, “From 1871 to 1881 half of the students emphasizing physics in the NST had already taken the MT, and from 1882 to 1889 about two-thirds taking physics in part II of the NST had already taken the MT (p. 352).”
A History of the Cavendish Laboratory, 46–47.
CUR 7 June 1881): 638. The Laboratory was kept open for these advanced students in July and August.
CUR (16 May 1884): 733.
CUR (3 June 1879): 676, and A History of the Cavendish Laboratory, 41.
CUR (13 June 1883): 880.
The data are based on the lecture lists in the CUR from 1879 to 1884.
CUR (15 March 1881): 407.
CUR (13 November 1883): 153.
CUR (8 January 1884): 330.
A History of the Cavendish Laboratory, 110.
Ibid., 43.
CUR (15 May 1877): 433, in Maxwell’s annual report. According to Maxwell’s account book, the Chancellor paid about £943 for the apparatus in June, 1876. Brackets added.
CUL MSS ADD 7655. III (c). 1: Circulating letter of Lord Rayleigh for the Apparatus Fund for the Cavendish Laboratory, dated 10 March 1880. This letter was published in CUR (18 May 1880): 557.
CUR (17 May 1881): 562.
CUR (3 February 1880): 272. During the Long Vacation (July and August), the fee was £2. 2s. See CUR (7 June 1881): 638.
CUR (13 June 1883): 880 and 901. Rayleigh thought that large fraction of these fees “should go to the Demonstrators, whose work is very laborious and inadequately remunerated by the official salaries.”
CUR (27 April 1875): 352–354.
Students in the elementary practical classes required basic instruments, “such as galvanometers.” In his annual report in 1881, Rayleigh stated that a large portion of the total expenditure had been spent on such miscellaneous apparatus (CUR (17 May 1881): 562). In his last annual report, in 1884, Rayleigh stated that “a large part of the current expenditure is upon materials and small goods which it would be useless to enumerate” (CUR (16 May 1884): 733).
M. J. G. Cattermole and A. F. Wolfe, Horace Darwin’s Shop: A History of the Cambridge Scientific Instrument Company, 1878 to 1968 (Bristol: Adam Hilger, 1987), 11.
CUR (15 May 1877): 434.
CUL MSS ADD 7655. V. (j). 3 (Maxwell’s account book); II 144 (31 October 1877) and 165 (28 October 1878), both from the Elliot Brothers to Maxwell.
For Stuart’s workshop, see T. J. N. Hilken, Engineering at Cambridge University,1783–1965 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 63–74.
CUR (17 May 1881): 563. In 1882, Fresnel’s interference apparatus and, in 1883, galvanometers were delivered from Stuart’s workshop to the Laboratory.
From an advertisement dated January 10, 1879. See Cattermole and Wolfe, Horace Darwin’s Shop, 14.
Quotations from CUR (2 April 1978): 420. Maxwell continued, “He has also made improvements in the working of instruments already in the Laboratory. He has also done work for other departments of the University. It now seems likely that his time will continue to be fully employed, and it is expected that much of the apparatus to be used in Cambridge, which has hitherto been ordered from London, may, in future, be constructed in Cambridge, and tested while in the maker’s hands by those who are to use it.”
See Gerald L. Geison, Michael Foster and the Cambridge School of Physiology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 182.
H. Darwin and G. H. Darwin, “First Report of B. A. Committee on Lunar Disturbance of Gravity,” B. A. Report (1880): 25–26; G. H. Darwin, H. Darwin, et al., “Second Report of B. A. Committee on Lunar Distarbance of Gravity,” B. A. Report (1882): 95; Rayleigh and A. Schuster, “On the Determination of the Ohm [B. A. Units] in Absolute Measure,” in Scientific Papers of Rayleigh, vol. 2, 5–6.
Cattermole and Wolfe, Horace Darwin’s Shop, 27.
CUR (22 May 1882): 582.
CUR (16 May 1884): 753. See also Cattermole and Wolfe, Horace Darwin’s Shop, 27–31. i0 Scientific Papers of Rayleigh, vol. 2, 38, 40, 88, and 290.
Cattermole and Wolfe, Horace Darwin’s Shop, 31.
A History of the Cavendish Laboratory, 35. Brackets added. See also J.J. Thomson et al., A Commemoration, 111.
A History’ of the Cavendish Laboratory, 46. See also Strutt, Life of Rayleigh, 104.
Strutt,Life of Rayleigh, 109.
CUR (2 February 1882): 283. Brackets added. Rayleigh said that he had no particular interest in electricity before coming to Cambridge. During the 1870’s, Rayleigh published more than sixty papers on various subjects, but only two of these were more or less related to electricity. See Scientific Papers of Rayleigh, vol. 1.
Maxwell, Treatise,vol. 1, 465 [article 335].
See A History of the Cavendish Laboratory, 59. Glazebrook described the situation as follows: “Thus Lenz in 1838 used the resistance of one foot of No. 11 copper wire. Wheatstone in 1843 proposed one foot of copper wire weighing 100 grains. In 1846 Hankel used a length of iron wire, while in 1848 Jacobi issued as a standard a certain length of copper wire known since as Jacobi’s standard. When telegraphs were introduced¡ in England a mile of No. 16 copper wire was adopted as a unit, in Germany the German mile of No. 8 iron wire was used, and in France the kilometre of iron wire 4 millimetres in diameter.”
“Report of the Committee appointed by the British Association on Standards of Electrical Resistance,” B. A. Report (1862): 126.
For more details, see “Report of the Committee appointed by the British Association on Standards of Electrical Resistance,” B. A. Report (1863): 111–176. The 1863 committee consisted of “Professor Wheatstone, Professor Williamson, Mr. C. F. Varley, Professor Thomson, Mr. Balfour Stewart, Mr. C. W. Simens, Dr. A. Mattiessen, Professor Maxwell, Professor Miller, Dr. Joule, Mr. Fleeming Jenkin, Dr. Esselbach, and Sir C. Bright.” For the theory of the experiment, see also Maxwell, Treatise, vol. 2, 408411 [article 763–766]. The early reports were later complied by Jenkin. See F. Jenkin ed., Reports of the Committee on Electrical Standards (London: Taylor and Francis, 1873). For a short but plausible description of the project, see I. B. Hopley, “Maxwell’s Work on Electrical Resistance: 1. The Determination of the Absolute Unit of Resistance,” Annals of Science, 13 (1957): 265–272; “Maxwell’s Work on Electrical Resistance: II. Proposals for the Re-Determination of the B.A. Unit of 1863,” Annals of Science, 14 (1958): 197–210.
Hopley, “Maxwell’s Work on Electrical Resistance I,” 269.
“Report of the Committee appointed by the British Association on Standards of Electrical Resistance,” B. A. Report (1871): ixix. However, the apparatus remained the property of the British Association and at the disposal of the Committee.
See Simon Schaffer, “Late Victorian Metrology and its Instrumentation: A Manufactory of Ohm,” in Robert Bud and Susan E. Cozzens (eds.), Invisible Connections: Instruments, Institutions, and Science (Bellingham, WA: Spie Optical Engineering Press, 1992), 23–56, and his “Accurate Measurement is an English Science.”
See Rayleigh and A. Schuster, “On the Determination of the Ohm [B. A. Unit] in Absolute Measure,” Proc Roy. Soc. 37 (1881): 104–141: “¡ Dr. Schuster took all the readings of the principal magnetometer. Mrs. Sidgwick observed the auxiliary magnetometer; while the regulation of the speed by stroboscopic observation fell to me.”
Ibid., 116. The Committee’s estimate was L ¡ª 437,000, while Rayleigh’s was 451,000.
The new apparatus was constructed by Messrs. Elliot’s shop under the superintendence of Rayleigh and Schuster. For details of the new apparatus, with a diagram, see Rayleigh, “Experiments to Determine the Value of the British Association Unit of Resistance in Absolute Measure,” Phil. Trans. 173 (1882): 661697. By resolution of the Paris Electric Congress (1882), the ohm became the standard unit (109 C.G.S.). Therefore the title of the paper was intentionally changed before publishing.
Strutt, Life of Rayleigh, 117–118.
Ibid., 123–127.
Rayleigh and Mrs. Sidgwick, “On the Specific Resistance of Mercury,” Phil. Trans. 174 (1882): 173185.
Rayleigh, “Comparison of Methods for the Determination of Resistances in Absolute Measure,” Phil. Mag. 14 (1882): 329–346.
Mrs. Sidgwick and Rayleigh, “Experiments, by the Method of Lorenz, for the Further Determination of the Absolute Value of the British Association Unit of Resistance, with an Appendix on the Determination of the Pitch of a Standard Turning-Fork,” Phil. Trans. 174 (1883): 295–322.
A History of the Cavendish Laboratory, 69.
Rayleigh and Mrs. Sidgwick, “On the Electro-Chemical Equivalent of Silver, and on the Absolute Electromotive Force of Clark Cells,” Phil. Trans. 175 (1884): 411–460. Additional experiments were conducted by Rayleigh and Mrs. Sidgwick in June, November, and December.
Strutt, Life of Rayleigh, 120.
A. Schuster, “Lord Rayleigh,” Supplement to Nature 118 (1926): 47–49 on 48.
R. T. Glazebrook, J. M. Dodds, and E. B. Sargant, “Experiments on the Value of the British Association Unit of Resistance,” Phil. Trans. 174 (1883): 223–268. The experiment consisted of two parts: Part I, which was regarded as preliminary, contained three series of experiments that were carried out by Glazebrook and Dodds; in Part 11 another three experiments were conducted by Glazebrook and Sargant.
Schaffer, “Late Victorian Metrology and its Instrumentation,” 24.
I omit Wilberforce because he first took the NST (part I only) and then the MT (parts I and II). ’x From 1882 on, men and women took the MT and the NST separately.
See John N. Howard, “Elanor Mildred Sidgwick and the Rayleighs,” Applied Optics 3 (1964): 11201122. For Mrs. Shaw, see A History of the Cavendish Laboratory, 73.
Some examples of Glazebrook’s work as follows: “On the Measurement of Small Resistance,” Phil. Mag. 11 (1881): 291–295; “On Molecular Vortex Theory of Electromagnetic Action,” Phil. Mag. 11 (1881): 397–413; “On some Equations connected with Electromagnetic Theory of Light,” Pro. Camb. Phil. Soc. 4 (1881): 155–167; “On the Refraction of Plane polarized Light at the Surface of a Uniaxal Crystal,” Phil. Trans. 173 (1882): 595–620; “On Spectrophotometer,” Proc. Camb. Phil. Soc. 4 (1883): 304–308; “On Curved Diffraction of Gratings,” Phil. Mag. 15 (1883): 414–423.
J.J. Thomson, “On the Determination of the Number of Electrostatic Units in the Electromagnetic Unit of Electricity,” Phil. Trans. 174 (1883): 707–721. His first experimental paper at the Cavendish was “On Some Electromagnetic Experiments with Open Circuits,” Phil. Mag. 12 (1881): 49–60.
G. H. Darwin et al., “Second Report of B.A. Committee on Lunar Disturbance of Gravity”; G. H. Darwin, “On the Formation of Ripple-Mark in Sand,” Proc. Roy. Soc. 36 (1883): 18–43.
L. R. Wilberforce, “On Some Experiments on the Measurement of the Capacity of a Condenser,” Proc. Carob. Phil. Soc. 5 (1884): 175–182.
J. A. Fleming, “On a New Form of Resistance-Balance adapted for comparing Standard Coils,” Phil. Mag. 9 (1880): 109–117 on 110. Fleming said this resistance-balance had been constructed in Stuart’s workshop under his direction.
John N. Howard, “John William Strutt, Third Baron Rayleigh,” Applied Optics 3 (1964): 1091–1101 on 1097.
“Address to the Mathematical and Physical Science Section of the British Association,” in Scientific Papers by Rayleigh, vol. 2, 118–124 on 118–119 and 121. Emphasis added. The goal of establishing a mathematical class for physics students was realized under J.J. See section 3.3.3 of this book.
When Rayleigh was appointed, Punch (13 December 1879, 273) ran an article, “Lord and Professor,” satirizing his election as Professor. However, his peerage contributed to his success as Director of the Cavendish. The Senate House made exceptional speed in approving nearly all his requests. For example, it approved the appointment of his two demonstrators in only ten days. Rayleigh’s organizational reform therefore advanced very smoothly. His rheumatic fever returned in October, 1882, and he spent several months in France, Italy, and Germany during 1882–83. See Strutt, Life of Rayleigh, 133–136.
See Strutt, Life of Rayleigh, 413. Rayleigh later recalled that “I could not have gone on working as hard as I was doing then.” (Ibid., 148.)
“y ”Presidential Address,“ in Scientific Papers by Rayleigh, vol. 2, 333–354 on 350. Emphasis added.
J.J. Thomson, “The Life of Lord Rayleigh (book review),” Nature 114 (1924): 814–816 on 816.
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Kim, DW. (2002). Rayleigh’s Directorship, 1880–1884. In: Leadership and Creativity. Archimedes, vol 5. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2055-7_2
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