A Short History of Nearly Everything

by Bill Bryson

The sentiment is understandable, for Kelvin really was a kind of Victorian superman. He was born in 1824 in Belfast, the son of a professor of mathematics at the Royal Academical Institution who soon afterwards transferred to Glasgow. There Kelvin proved himself such a prodigy that he was admitted to Glasgow University at the exceedingly tender age of ten. By the time he had reached his early twenties, he had studied at institutions in London and Paris, graduated from Cambridge (where he won the university’s top prizes for rowing and mathematics, and somehow found time to launch a musical society as well), been elected a fellow of Peterhouse, and written (in French and English) a dozen papers in pure and applied mathematics of such dazzling originality that he had to publish them anonymously for fear of embarrassing his superiors. At the age of twenty-two he returned to Glasgow to take up a professorship in natural philosophy, a position he would hold for the next fifty-three years.