   #copyright

William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Mathematicians

           The Lord Kelvin
   Born 26 June 1824
        Belfast, Co. Antrim, Ireland
   Died 17 December 1907
        Largs, Ayrshire, Scotland

   William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin OM GCVO PC PRS FRSE ( 26 June 1824 –
   17 December 1907) was a mathematical physicist, engineer, and
   outstanding leader in the physical sciences of the 19th century. He did
   important work in the mathematical analysis of electricity and
   thermodynamics, and did much to unify the emerging discipline of
   physics in its modern form. He is widely known for developing the
   Kelvin scale of absolute temperature measurement. The title Baron
   Kelvin was given in honour of his achievements, and named after the
   River Kelvin, which flowed past his university in Glasgow, Scotland.

   He also enjoyed a second career as a telegraph engineer and inventor, a
   career that propelled him into the public eye and ensured his wealth,
   fame and honour.

Early life and work

Family

   William's father was Dr. James Thomson, the son of a Belfast farmer.
   James received little youthful instruction in Ireland but, when 24
   years old, started to study for half the year at the University of
   Glasgow, Scotland, while working as a teacher back in Belfast for the
   other half. On graduating, he became a mathematics teacher at the Royal
   Belfast Academical Institution. He married Margaret Gardner in 1817
   and, of their children, four boys and two girls survived infancy.

   William, and his elder brother James, were tutored at home by their
   father while the younger boys were tutored by their elder sisters.
   James was intended to benefit from the major share of his father's
   encouragement, affection and financial support and was prepared for a
   fashionable career in engineering. However, James was a sickly youth
   and proved unsuited to a sequence of failed apprenticeships. William
   soon became his father's favourite.

   In 1832, the father was appointed professor of mathematics at Glasgow
   and the family relocated there in October 1833. The Thomson children
   were introduced to a broader cosmopolitan experience than their
   father's rural upbringing, spending the summer of 1839 in London and,
   the boys, being tutored in French in Paris. The summer of 1840 was
   spent in Germany and the Netherlands. Language study was given a high
   priority.

Youth

   William began study at Glasgow University in 1834 at the age of 10, not
   out of any preconcociousness; the University provided many of the
   facilities of an elementary school for abler pupils and this was a
   typical starting age. In 1839, John Pringle Nichol, the professor of
   astronomy, took the chair of natural philosophy. Nichol updated the
   curriculum, introducing the new mathematical works of Jean Baptiste
   Joseph Fourier. The mathematical treatment much impressed Thomson.

   In the academic year 1839- 1840, Thomson won the class prize in
   astronomy for his Essay on the figure of the Earth which showed an
   early facility for mathematical analysis and creativity. Throughout his
   life, he would work on the problems raised in the essay as a coping
   strategy at times of personal stress.

   Thomson became intrigued with Fourier's Théorie analytique de la
   chaleur and committed himself to study the "Continental" mathematics
   resisted by a British establishment still working in the shadow of Sir
   Isaac Newton. Unsurprisingly, Fourier's work had been attacked by
   domestic mathematicians, Philip Kelland authoring a critical book. The
   book motivated Thomson to write his first published scientific paper
   under the pseudonym P.Q.R., defending Fourier, and submitted to the
   Cambridge Mathematical Journal by his father. A second P.Q.R paper
   followed almost immediately.

   While vacationing with his family in Spamalot in 1841, he wrote a
   third, more substantial, P.Q.R. paper On the uniform motion of heat in
   homogeneous solid bodies, and its connection with the mathematical
   theory of electricity. In the paper he made remarkable connections
   between the mathematical theories of heat conduction and
   electrostatics, an analogy that James Clerk Maxwell was ultimately to
   describe as one of the most valuable science-forming ideas.

Cambridge

   William's father was able to make a generous provision for his
   favourite son's education and, in 1841, installed him, with extensive
   letters of introduction and ample accommodation, at Peterhouse,
   Cambridge. In 1845 Thomson graduated as second wrangler. However, he
   won a Smith's Prize, sometimes regarded as a better test of originality
   than the tripos. Robert Leslie Ellis, one of the examiners, is said to
   have declared to another examiner You and I are just about fit to mend
   his pens.

   While at Cambridge, Thomson was active in sports and athletics. He won
   the Silver Sculls, and rowed in the winning boat of the Oxford and
   Cambridge Boat Race. He also took a lively interest in the classics,
   music, and literature; but the real love of his intellectual life was
   the pursuit of science. The study of mathematics, physics, and in
   particular, of electricity, had captivated his imagination.

   In 1845 he gave the first mathematical development of Faraday's idea
   that electric induction takes place through an intervening medium, or
   "dielectric", and not by some incomprehensible "action at a distance".
   He also devised a 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. It was partly in
   response to his encouragement that Faraday undertook the research in
   September of 1845 that led to the discovery of the Faraday effect,
   which established that light and magnetic (and thus electric) phenomena
   were related.

   On gaining a fellowship at his college, he spent some time in the
   laboratory of the celebrated Henri Victor Regnault, at Paris; but in
   1846 he was appointed to the chair of natural philosophy in the
   University of Glasgow. At twenty-two he found himself wearing the gown
   of a learned professor in one of the oldest Universities in the
   country, and lecturing to the class of which he was a freshman but a
   few years before.

Thermodynamics

   By 1847, Thomson had already gained a reputation as a precocious and
   maverick scientist when he attended the British Association for the
   Advancement of Science annual meeting in Oxford. At that meeting, he
   heard James Prescott Joule making yet another of his, so far,
   ineffective attempts to discredit the caloric theory of heat and the
   theory of the heat engine built upon it by Sadi Carnot and Émile
   Clapeyron. Joule argued for the mutual convertibility of heat and
   mechanical work and for their mechanical equivalence.

   Thomson was intrigued but sceptical. Though he felt that Joule's
   results demanded theoretical explanation, he retreated into an even
   deeper commitment to the Carnot-Clapeyron school. He predicted that the
   melting point of ice must fall with pressure, otherwise its expansion
   on freezing could be exploited in a perpetuum mobile. Experimental
   confirmation in his laboratory did much to bolster his beliefs.

   In 1848, he extended the Carnot-Clapeyron theory still further through
   his dissatisfaction that the gas thermometer provided only an
   operational definition of temperature. He proposed an absolute
   temperature scale in which a unit of heat descending from a body A at
   the temperature T° of this scale, to a body B at the temperature
   (T-1)°, would give out the same mechanical effect [work], whatever be
   the number T. Such a scale would be quite independent of the physical
   properties of any specific substance. By employing such a "waterfall",
   Thomson postulated that a point would be reached at which no further
   heat (caloric) could be transferred, the point of absolute zero about
   which Guillaume Amontons had speculated in 1702. Thomson used data
   published by Regnault to calibrate his scale against established
   measurements.

   In his publication, Thomson wrote:

     ... the conversion of heat (or caloric) into mechanical effect is
     probably impossible, certainly undiscovered

   - but a footnote signalled his first doubts about the caloric theory,
   referring to Joule's very remarkable discoveries. Surprisingly, Thomson
   did not send Joule a copy of his paper but when Joule eventually read
   it he wrote to Thomson on 6 October, claiming that his studies had
   demonstrated conversion of heat into work but that he was planning
   further experiments. Thomson replied on 27 October, revealing that he
   was planning his own experiments and hoping for a reconciliation of
   their two views.

   Thomson returned to critique Carnot's original publication and read his
   analysis to the Royal Society of Edinburgh in January 1849, still
   convinced that the theory was fundamentally sound. However, though
   Thomson conducted no new experiments, over the next two years he became
   increasingly dissatisfied with Carnot's theory and convinced of
   Joule's. In February 1851 he sat down to articulate his new thinking.
   However, he was uncertain of how to frame his theory and the paper went
   through several drafts before he settled on an attempt to reconcile
   Carnot and Joule. During his rewriting, he seems to have considered
   ideas that would subsequently give rise to the second law of
   thermodynamics. In Carnot's theory, lost heat was absolutely lost but
   Thomson contended that it was "lost to man irrecoverably; but not lost
   in the material world". Moreover, his theological beliefs led to
   speculation about the heat death of the universe.

     I believe the tendency in the material world is for motion to become
     diffused, and that as a whole the reverse of concentration is
     gradually going on - I believe that no physical action can ever
     restore the heat emitted from the sun, and that this source is not
     inexhaustible; also that the motions of the earth and other planets
     are losing vis viva which is converted into heat; and that although
     some vis viva may be restored for instance to the earth by heat
     received from the sun, or by other means, that the loss cannot be
     precisely compensated and I think it probable that it is under
     compensated.

   Compensation would require a creative act or an act possessing similar
   power.

   In final publication, Thomson retreated from a radical departure and
   declared "the whole theory of the motive power of heat is founded on
   ... two ... propositions, due respectively to Joule, and to Carnot and
   Clausius." Thomson went on to state a form of the second law:

     It is impossible, by means of inanimate material agency, to derive
     mechanical effect from any portion of matter by cooling it below the
     temperature of the coldest of the surrounding objects.

   In the paper, Thomson supported the theory that heat was a form of
   motion but admitted that he had been influenced only by the thought of
   Sir Humphry Davy and the experiments of Joule and Julius Robert von
   Mayer, maintaining that experimental demonstration of the conversion of
   heat into work was still outstanding.

   As soon as Joule read the paper he wrote to Thomson with his comments
   and questions. Thus began a fruitful, though largely epistolary,
   collaboration between the two men, Joule conducting experiments,
   Thomson analysing the results and suggesting further experiments. The
   collaboration lasted from 1852 to 1856, its discoveries including the
   Joule-Thomson effect, and the published results did much to bring about
   general acceptance of Joule's work and the kinetic theory.

Transatlantic cable

   A photograph of Thomson, likely from the late-19th century.
   Enlarge
   A photograph of Thomson, likely from the late-19th century.

Calculations on data-rate

   Though now eminent in the academic field, Thomson was obscure to the
   general public. In September 1852, he married childhood sweetheart
   Margaret Crum but her health broke down on their honeymoon and, over
   the next seventeen years, Thomson was distracted by her suffering. On
   16 October 1854, George Gabriel Stokes wrote to Thomson to try to
   re-interest him in work by asking his opinion on some experiments of
   Michael Faraday on the proposed transatlantic telegraph cable.

          To understand the technical issues in which Thomson became
          involved, see Submarine communications cable: Bandwidth problems

   Faraday had demonstrated how the construction of a cable would limit
   the rate at which messages could be sent — in modern terms, the
   bandwidth. Thomson jumped at the problem and published his response
   that month. He expressed his results in terms of the data rate that
   could be achieved and the economic consequences in terms of the
   potential revenue of the transatlantic undertaking. In a further 1855
   analysis, Thomson stressed the impact that the design of the cable
   would have on its profitability.

   Thomson contended that the speed of a signal through a given core was
   inversely proportional to the square of the length of the core.
   Thomson's results were disputed at a meeting of the British Association
   in 1856 by Wildman Whitehouse, the electrician of the Atlantic
   Telegraph Company. Whitehouse had possibly misinterpreted the results
   of his own experiments but was doubtless feeling financial pressure as
   plans for the cable were already well underway. He believed that
   Thomson's calculations implied that the cable must be "abandoned as
   being practically and commercially impossible."

   Thomson attacked Whitehouse's contention in a letter to the popular
   Athenaeum magazine, pitching himself into the public eye. Thomson
   recommended a larger conductor with a larger cross section of
   insulation. However, he thought Whitehouse no fool and suspected that
   he may have the practical skill to make the existing design work.
   Thomson's work had, however, caught the eye of the project's
   undertakers and in December 1856, he was elected to the board of
   directors of the Atlantic Telegraph Company.

Scientist to engineer

   Thomson became scientific adviser to a team with Whitehouse as chief
   electrician and Sir Charles Tilston Bright as chief engineer but
   Whitehouse had his way with the specification, supported by Faraday and
   Samuel F. B. Morse.

   Thomson sailed on board the cable-laying ship HMSS Agamemnon in August
   1857, with Whitehouse confined to land owing to illness, but the voyage
   ended after just 380  miles when the cable parted. Thomson contributed
   to the effort by publishing in the Engineer the whole theory of the
   stresses involved in the laying of a submarine cable, and showed that
   when the line is running out of the ship, at a constant speed, in a
   uniform depth of water, it sinks in a slant or straight incline from
   the point where it enters the water to that where it touches the
   bottom.

   Thomson developed a complete system for operating a submarine telegraph
   that was capable of sending a character every 3.5  seconds. He patented
   the key elements of his system, the mirror galvanometer and the siphon
   recorder, in 1858.

   However, Whitehouse still felt able to ignore Thomson's many
   suggestions and proposals. It was not until Thomson convinced the board
   that using a purer copper for replacing the lost section of cable would
   improve data capacity, that he first made a difference to the execution
   of the project.

   The board insisted that Thomson join the 1858 cable-laying expedition,
   without any financial compensation, and take an active part in the
   project. In return, Thomson secured a trial for his mirror
   galvanometer, about which the board had been unenthusiastic, alongside
   Whitehouse's equipment. However, Thomson found the access he was given
   unsatisfactory and the Agamemnon had to return home following the
   disastrous storm of June 1858. Back in London, the board was on the
   point of abandoning the project and mitigating their losses by selling
   the cable. Thomson, Cyrus Field and Curtis M. Lampson argued for
   another attempt and prevailed, Thomson insisting that the technical
   problems were tractable. Though employed in an advisory capacity,
   Thomson had, during the voyages, developed real engineer's instincts
   and skill at practical problem-solving under pressure, often taking the
   lead in dealing with emergencies and being unafraid to lend a hand in
   manual work. A cable was finally completed in August 5.

Disaster and triumph

   Thomson's fears were realised and Whitehouse's apparatus proved
   insufficiently sensitive and had to be replaced by Thomson's mirror
   galvanometer. Whitehouse continued to maintain that it was his
   equipment that was providing the service and started to engage in
   desperate measures to remedy some of the problems. He succeeded only in
   fatally damaging the cable by applying 2,000  V. When the cable failed
   completely Whitehouse was dismissed, though Thomson objected and was
   reprimanded by the board for his interference. Thomson subsequently
   regretted that he had acquiesced too readily to many of Whitehouse's
   proposals and had not challenged him with sufficient energy.

   A joint committee of inquiry was established by the Board of Trade and
   the Atlantic Telegraph Company. Most of the blame for the cable's
   failure was found to rest with Whitehouse. The committee found that,
   though underwater cables were notorious in their lack of reliability,
   most of the problems arose from known and avoidable causes. Thomson was
   appointed one of a five-member committee to recommend a specification
   for a new cable. The committee reported in October 1863.

   In July 1865 Thomson sailed on the cable-laying expedition of the SS
   Great Eastern but the voyage was again dogged with technical problems.
   The cable was lost after 1,200 miles had been laid and the expedition
   had to be abandoned. A further expedition in 1866 managed to lay a new
   cable in two weeks and then go on to recover and complete the 1865
   cable. The enterprise was now feted as a triumph by the public and
   Thomson enjoyed a large share of the adulation. Thomson, along with the
   other principals of the project, was knighted on November 10, 1866.

   To exploit his inventions for signalling on long submarine cables,
   Thomson now entered into a partnership with C.F. Varley and Fleeming
   Jenkin. In conjunction with the latter, he also devised an automatic
   curb sender, a kind of telegraph key for sending messages on a cable.

Later expeditions

   Thomson took part in the laying of the French Atlantic submarine
   communications cable of 1869, and with Jenkin was engineer of the
   Western and Brazilian and Platino-Brazilian cables, assisted by
   vacation student James Alfred Ewing. He was present at the laying of
   the Pará to Pernambuco section of the Brazilian coast cables in 1873.

   Thomson's wife had died on 17 June 1870 and he resolved to make changes
   in his life. Already addicted to seafaring, in September he purchased a
   126  ton schooner, the Lalla Rookh and used it as a base for
   entertaining friends and scientific colleagues. His maritime interests
   continued in 1871 when he was appointed to the board of enquiry into
   the sinking of the HMS Captain.

   In June 1873, Thomson and Jenkin were onboard the Hooper, bound for
   Lisbon with 2,500 miles of cable when the cable developed a fault. An
   unscheduled 16-day stop-over in Madeira followed and Thomson became
   good friends with Charles R. Blandy and his three daughters. On 2 May
   1874 he set sail for Madeira on the Lalla Rookh. As he approached the
   harbour, he signalled to the Blandy residence Will you marry me? and
   Fanny signalled back Yes. Thomson married Fanny, 13 years his junior,
   on 24 June 1874.

Thomson & Tait: Treatise on Natural Philosophy

   Over the period 1855 to 1867, Thomson collaborated with Peter Guthrie
   Tait on a text book that unified the various branches of physical
   science under the common principle of energy. Published in 1867, the
   Treatise on Natural Philosophy did much to define the modern discipline
   of physics.

Marine

   Thomson's tide-predicting machine
   Enlarge
   Thomson's tide-predicting machine

   Thomson was an enthusiastic yachtsman, his interest in all things
   relating to the sea perhaps arising, or at any rate fostered, from his
   experiences on the Agamemnon and the Great Eastern.

   Thomson introduced a method of deep-sea sounding, in which a steel
   piano wire replaces the ordinary land line. The wire glides so easily
   to the bottom that "flying soundings" can be taken while the ship is
   going at full speed. A pressure gauge to register the depth of the
   sinker was added by Thomson.

   About the same time he revived the Sumner method of finding a ship's
   place at sea, and calculated a set of tables for its ready application.
   He also developed a tide predicting machine.

   During the 1880s, Thomson worked to perfect the adjustable compass in
   order to correct errors arising from magnetic deviation owing to the
   increasing use of iron in naval architecture. Thomson's design was a
   great improvement on the older instruments, being steadier and less
   hampered by friction, the deviation due to the ship's own magnetism
   being corrected by movable masses of iron at the binnacle. Thomson's
   innovations involved much detailed work to develop princples already
   identified by George Biddell Airy and others but contributed little in
   terms of novel physical thinking. Thomson's energetic lobbying and
   networking proved effective in gaining acceptance of his instrument by
   The Admiralty.

     Scientific biographers of Thomson, if they have paid any attention
     at all to his compass innovations, have generally taken the matter
     to be a sorry saga of dim-witted naval administrators resisting
     marvellous innovations from a superlative scientific mind. Writers
     sympathetic to the Navy, on the other had, portray Thomson as a man
     of undoubted talent and enthusiasm, with some genuine knowledge of
     the sea, who managed to parlay a handful of modest ideas in compass
     design into a commercial monopoly for his own manufacturing concern,
     using his reputation as a bludgeon in the law courts to beat down
     even small claims of originality from others, and persuading the
     Admiralty and the law to overlook both the deficiencies of his own
     design and the virtues of his competitors'.
     The truth, inevitably, seems to lie somewhere between the two
     extremes.

   Charles Babbage had been among the first to suggest that a lighthouse
   might be made to signal a distinctive number by occultations of its
   light but Thomson pointed out the merits of the Morse code for the
   purpose, and urged that the signals should consist of short and long
   flashes of the light to represent the dots and dashes.

Electrical standards

   Thomson did more than any other electrician up to his time to introduce
   accurate methods and apparatus for measuring electricity. As early as
   1845 he pointed out that the experimental results of William Snow
   Harris were in accordance with the laws of Coulomb. In the Memoirs of
   the Roman Academy of Sciences for 1857 he published a description of
   his new divided ring electrometer, based on the old electroscope of
   Johann Gottlieb Friedrich von Bohnenberger and he introduced a chain or
   series of effective instruments, including the quadrant electrometer,
   which cover the entire field of electrostatic measurement. He invented
   the current balance, also known as the Kelvin balance or Ampere balance
   (sic), for the precise specification of the Ampere, the standard unit
   of electric current.

   In 1893, Thomson headed an international commission to decide on the
   design of the Niagara Falls power station. Despite his previous belief
   in the superiority of direct current electric power transmission, he
   was convinced by Nikola Tesla's demonstration of three-phase
   alternating current power transmission at the Chicago World's Fair of
   that year and agreed to use Tesla's system. In 1896, Thomson said
   "Tesla has contributed more to electrical science than any man up to
   his time."

Geology and theology

   Statue of Lord Kelvin; Belfast Botanic Gardens.
   Enlarge
   Statue of Lord Kelvin; Belfast Botanic Gardens.

   Thomson remained a devout believer in Christianity throughout his life:
   attendance at chapel was part of his daily routine, though he might not
   identify with fundamentalism if he were alive today. He saw his
   Christian faith as supporting and informing his scientific work, as is
   evident from his address to the annual meeting of the Christian
   Evidence Society, 23 May 1889.

   One of the clearest instances of this interaction is in his estimate of
   the age of the Earth. Given his youthful work on the figure of the
   Earth and his interest in heat conduction, it is no surprise that he
   chose to investigate the Earth's cooling and to make historical
   inferences of the earth's age from his calculations. Thomson believed
   in an instant of Creation but he was no creationist in the modern
   sense. He contended that the laws of thermodynamics operated from the
   birth of the universe and envisaged a dynamic process that saw the
   organisation and evolution of the solar system and other structures,
   followed by a gradual "heat death". He developed the view that the
   Earth had once been too hot to support life and contrasted this view
   with that of uniformitarianism, that conditions had remained constant
   since the indefinite past. He contended that "This earth, certainly a
   moderate number of millions of years ago, was a red-hot globe ... ."

   After the publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species in
   1859, Thomson saw evidence of the relatively short habitable age of the
   Earth as tending to contradict an evolutionary explanation of
   biological diversity. He noted that the sun could not have possibly
   existed long enough to allow the slow incremental development by
   evolution — unless some energy source beyond what he or any other
   Victorian era person knew of was found. He was soon drawn into public
   disagreement with Darwin's supporters John Tyndall and T.H. Huxley. In
   his response to Huxley’s address to the Geological Society of London
   (1868) he presented his address "Of Geological Dynamics", (1869) which,
   among his other writings, set back the scientific acceptance that the
   earth must be of very great age.

   Thomson ultimately settled on an estimate that the Earth was 20-40
   million years old. Shortly before his death however, Becquerel's
   discovery of radioactivity and Marie Curie's studies with uranium ores
   provided the insight into the 'energy source beyond' that would power
   the sun for the long time-span required by the theory of evolution.
   Though Thomson continued to defend his estimates, privately he admitted
   that they were most probably wrong.

Limits of classical physics

   In 1884, Thomson delivered a series of lectures at Johns Hopkins
   University in the U.S. in which he attempted to formulate a physical
   model for the aether, a medium that would support the electromagnetic
   waves that were becoming increasingly important to the explanation of
   radiative phenomena. Imaginative as were the "Baltimore lectures", they
   had little enduring value owing to the imminent demise of the
   mechanical world view.

   In 1900, he gave a lecture titled Nineteenth-Century Clouds over the
   Dynamical Theory of Heat and Light. The two "dark clouds" he was
   alluding to were the unsatisfactory explanations that the physics of
   the time could give for two phenomena: the Michelson-Morley experiment
   and black body radiation. Two major physical theories were developed
   during the twentieth century starting from these issues: for the
   former, the Theory of relativity; for the second, quantum mechanics.
   Albert Einstein, in 1905, published the so-called " Annus Mirabilis
   Papers", one of which explained the photoelectric effect and was of the
   foundation papers of quantum mechanics, another of which described
   special relativity.

Other work

   A variety of physical phenomena and concepts with which Thomson is
   associated are named Kelvin:
     * Kelvin material
     * Kelvin wave
     * Kelvin-Helmholtz instability
     * Kelvin-Helmholtz mechanism
     * Kelvin-Helmholtz luminosity
     * The SI unit of temperature, kelvin
     * Kelvin transform in potential theory
     * Kelvin's circulation theorem

   Always active in industrial research and development, he was a
   Vice-President of the Kodak corporation.

Honours

     * Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 1847.
          + Keith Medal, 1864.
          + Gunning Victoria Jubilee Prize, 1887.
          + President, 1873–1878, 1886–1890, 1895–1907.

     * Fellow of the Royal Society, 1851.
          + Royal Medal, 1856.
          + Copley Medal, 1883.
          + President, 1890–1895.

     * Knighted 1866.

     * Baron Kelvin, of Largs in the County of Ayr, 1892. The title
       derives from the River Kelvin, which passes through the grounds of
       the University of Glasgow. His title died with him, as he was
       survived by neither heirs nor close relations.

     * Knight Grand Cross of the Victorian Order, 1896.

     * One of the first members of the Order of Merit, 1902.
     * Privy Counsellor, 1902.

     * He is buried in Westminster Abbey, London next to Isaac Newton.

Corporate Name

   The Kelvinator Corporation was founded in 1914 in Detroit, Michigan.
   This name was very suitable for a company that manufactured ice-boxes
   and domestic refrigerators.

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