Few men lived to witness so many remarkable discoveries in science and so many applications of the same to the welfare of the race as did the man whose name stands at the head of this chapter. When William Thomson, the future Lord Kelvin, first saw the light of day, the voltaic pile was in a rudimentary and inefficient form. It is true that water had been decomposed by the current from a pile in 1800,[37] that the magnetic effect of the current had been discovered in 1820, and the possibility of a practical form of an electric telegraph suggested in the same year; but Ohm's law was still one of nature's secrets, electromagnetic induction was undiscovered, and the doctrine of energy but ill understood. Light, electricity and magnetism were regarded as distinct forces, and heat was thought to be a material substance, to which the name caloric was assigned. What Young, Fresnel and Ampère were in the early years of the nineteenth century; what Faraday, Regnault and Joseph Henry were some time later, Kelvin became in the 'fifties, a leader in the intellectual and scientific life of the time, a leader destined to extend the frontiers of knowledge, to establish an accurate system of electrical measurement, and to enrich the world with instruments of marvelous ingenuity and precision. William Thomson, born in Belfast in 1824, received his early training in the Royal Academic Institute of that city. When eight years of age, he left his native land, exchanging the shores of Antrim for the banks of the Clyde. His father, James Thomson, a mathematician of note, having been appointed to the chair of mathematics in the University of Glasgow (founded in 1451), proceeded early in the summer of 1832 to the commercial metropolis of Scotland, accompanied by his two sons William and James, both of whom were destined to add lustre to the family name.