Lord Kelvin

Before Lord Kelvin was born, his father and fellow students leapt a fence to chase a “black chimney” racing across a field. It was a steamboat on the Clyde—and a glimpse of a world being remade by science and invention.

Andrew Gray’s account begins in the early nineteenth century, amid Glasgow’s classrooms and the new mathematics transforming the study of nature. James Thomson, a gifted teacher who brought continental methods into his work, helped shape the education of his son William, the future Lord Kelvin. The book follows Kelvin’s scientific life rather than attempting a full biography: from formative lessons to work that would carry ideas into the practical worlds of electricity, heat and engineering. How did a boy raised in a professor’s household become one of the age’s great investigators—and what did he see in nature that others had yet to grasp?

With centuries of literature, it's inevitable that some will fall through the cracks. We hunt down public domain works and restore them so they're not lost to the world.

Who are we? We're Cairn Press. Our background is in design, publishing, typography, and technology. These skills fuel our mission to create the highest quality Public Domain eBooks available online, at an affordable price. We give them the treatment they deserve; our proprietary process restores books for a better overall user experience in design, readability, and e-reader compatibility.