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Sir Joseph John Thomson

1911 Encyclopedia Britannica

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"SIR JOSEPH JOHN THOMSON (1856-), British physicist, was born near Manchester Dec. 18 1856 and was educated at Owens College, Manchester, and subsequently at Trinity College, Cambridge, where in 1880 he graduated as second wrangler. In the same year he was elected a fellow of Trinity College, and became second Smith's prizeman. In 1883 he was appointed lecturer in Trinity College, and in the following year Cavendish professor of experimental physics in the university of Cambridge, a position he occupied until his resignation in 1918. He developed a great research laboratory of experimental physics, attracting numerous workers from many countries and colonies; advances were made in the investigation of the conduction of electricity through gases, in the determination of the charge and mass of the electron and in the development of analysis by means of positive rays. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1884, became president of the Cambridge Philosophical Society in 1894, president of Section A of the British Association in 1896, and president of the Royal Society in 1915. In 1905 he held the professorship of physics in the Royal Institution, London, in addition to his Cambridge professorship. He was knighted in 1908 and awarded the O.M. in 1912. He was the recipient of many British and foreign awards and honours, amongst these being the Royal and Hughes medals of the Royal Society in 1894 and 1902 respectively, the Hodgkins medal of the Smithsonian Institute of Washington in 1902, the Nobel Prize for physics in 1906, enrolment as honorary graduate of many universities, and as honorary fellow of numerous American and continental scientific academies. During the World War he presided over several research committees and he assisted various Government departments in an advisory capacity. In 1918 he was appointed master of Trinity College, Cambridge, and in the following year was elected to a newly established professorship of physics in the Cavendish Laboratory, where he continued to prosecute his researches. In addition to a large number of publications in the Proceedings of the Royal Society and the Philosophical Magazine, he has published A Treatise on the Motion of Vortex Rings (1884); The Application of Dynamics to Physics and Chemistry (1886); Recent Researches in Electricity and Magnetism (1892); Elements of the Mathematical Theory of Electricity and Magnetism (18 95, 5th ed. 1921); The Discharge of Electricity through Gases (1897); The Conduction of Electricity through Gases (1903); and, with Prof. Poynting, a number of text-books upon physics.