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Heroes of the Telegraph
·
John Munro
63
While
at
Cambridge
he
took
an
active
part
in
the
field
sports
and
athletics
of
the
University.
He
won
the
Silver
Sculls,
and
rowed
in
the
winning
boat
of
the
Oxford
and
Cambridge
race.
He
also
took
a
lively
interest
in
the
classics,
in
music,
and
in
general
literature;
but
the
real
love,
the
central
passion
of
his
intellectual
life,
was
the
pursuit
of
science.
The
study
of
mathematics,
physics,
and
in
particular,
of
electricity,
had
captivated
his
imagination,
and
soon
engrossed
all
the
teeming
faculties
of
his
mind.
At
the
age
of
seventeen,
when
ordinary
lads
are
fond
of
games,
and
the
cleverer
sort
are
content
to
learn
without
attempting
to
originate,
young
Thomson
had
begun
to
make
investigations.
The
CAMBRIDGE
MATHEMATICAL
JOURNAL
of
1842
contains
a
paper
by
him--'On
the
uniform
motion
of
heat
in
homogeneous
solid
bodies,
and
its
connection
with
the
mathematical
theory
of
electricity.'
In
this
he
demonstrated
the
identity
of
the
laws
governing
the
distribution
of
electric
or
magnetic
force
in
general,
with
the
laws
governing
the
distribution
of
the
lines
of
the
motion
of
heat
in
certain
special
cases.
The
paper
was
followed
by
others
on
the
mathematical
theory
of
electricity;
and
in
1845
he
gave
the
first
mathematical
development
of
Faraday's
notion,
that
electric
induction
takes
place
through
an
intervening
medium,
or
'dielectric,'
and
not
by
some
incomprehensible
'action
at
a
distance.'
He
also
devised
an
hypothesis
of
electrical
images,
which
became
a
powerful
agent
in
solving
problems
of
electrostatics,
or
the
science
which
deals
with
the
forces
of
electricity
at
rest.
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