Balfour Stewart

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Balfour Stewart bigraphy, stories - British writer

Balfour Stewart : biography

1 November 1828 – 19 December 1887

Balfour Stewart (1 November 1828 – 19 December 1887) was a Scottish physicist. His studies in the field of radiant heat led to him receiving the Rumford Medal of the Royal Society in 1868. In 1859 he was appointed director of Kew Observatory. He was elected professor of physics at Owens College, Manchester, and retained that chair until his death, which happened near Drogheda, in Ireland, on 19 December 1887. He was the author of several successful science textbooks, and also of the article on "Terrestrial Magnetism" in the ninth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica.

Career

Stewart was born in Edinburgh, and was educated at Dundee, the University of St Andrews, and the University of Edinburgh. The son of a tea merchant, he was for some time engaged in business in Leith and in Australia, but, returning to his studies of physics at Edinburgh, he became assistant to J. D. Forbes in 1856. Forbes was especially interested in questions of heat, meteorology, and terrestrial magnetism, and it was to these that Stewart also mainly devoted himself.

Radiant heat first claimed his attention, and by 1858 he had completed his first investigations into the subject. These yielded a remarkable extension of Pierre Prévost’s "Law of Exchanges," and enabled him to establish the fact that radiation is not a surface phenomenon, but takes place throughout the interior of the radiating body, and that the radiative and absorptive powers of a substance must be equal, not only for the radiation as a whole, but also for every constituent of it.

In recognition of this work he received in 1868 the Rumford Medal of the Royal Society, into which he had been elected six years before. Of other papers in which he dealt with this and kindred branches of physics may be mentioned "Observations with a Rigid Spectroscope," "Heating of a Disc by Rapid Motion in Vacuo," "Thermal Equilibrium in an Enclosure Containing Matter in Visible Motion," and "Internal Radiation in Uniaxal Crystals."

In 1859 he was appointed director of Kew Observatory, and there naturally became interested in problems of meteorology and terrestrial magnetism. In 1870, the year in which he was very seriously injured in a railway accident, he was elected professor of physics at Owens College, Manchester, and retained that chair until his death, which happened near Drogheda, in Ireland, on 19 December 1887.

He was the author of several successful textbooks of science, and also of the article on "Terrestrial Magnetism" in the ninth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. In conjunction with Professor P. G. Tait he wrote The Unseen Universe, at first published anonymously, which was intended to combat the common notion of the incompatibility of science and religion. A devoted churchman, Stewart was prominently identified with the Society for Psychical Research.New International Encyclopedia It was in his 1875 review of The Unseen Universe, that William James first put forth his Will to Believe Doctrine.

Writings

  • Elementary Treatise on Heat (1866; sixth edition, revised, 1895)
  • Lessons in Elementary Physics (1871)
  • Physics (1872)
  • The Conservation of Energy (1875; ninth edition, 1900)
  • Lessons in Practical Physics with W. H. Gee, (volume i, 1885; volume ii, 1887)

Stewart Super Flare

Balfour Stewart recorded a super flare on the evening of 28 August 1859 and the morning of 2 September 1859, at the Kew Observatory, and presented his findings in a paper presented to the Royal Society on 21 November 1861. by Balfour Stewart, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Vol. 11, (1860 – 1862), pp. 407-410 by Balfour Stewart, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Vol. 151, (1861), pp. 423-430 He noted that while "magnetic disturbances of unusual violence and very wide extent" were recorded in various places around the world, the Kew Observatory had the benefit of self-recording magnetographs, by Balfour Stewart, 1859; which allowed "the means of obtaining a continuous photographic register of the state of the three elements of the earth’s magnetic force—namely, the declination, and the horizontal and vertical intensity."