Rope em pardner.

I admit I've been reading the Regulators. They don't write hay burners like that anymore.

I have just time for a short post tonight (I'm heading home tomorrow yay!) so I think it's important we meet William Thompson. He's better known to the rest of us a Lord Kelvin. The British physicist and engineer. That wiley genius who invented the Kelvin scale of temperature.

A quick backgrounder on those of you who missed that class. Kelvin temperature measurement is based on an absolute scale, that is, zero K is as cold as it gets. The complete absense of heat. After that, it only goes up. By the way, temperatures in Kelvin are simply Kelvin, not degrees Kelvin.

And the name Kelvin comes from. Having been named to the peerage, a baron is the lowest, the name he was given comes from the River Kelvin, which runs past Glasgow University.

Since this is a short piece on the man, we'll jump ahead to his work on the telegraph. It was in the mid 1850's and Thompson had been distracted by his wife's lifelong frailness, being constantly sick. Inspired by work begun on a possible transatlantic telegraph cable, he went to work figuring out how to get the signal to go thousands of miles. Remember that this is in a time when the most reliable sources of electricity still came from the sky.

He tackled the hypothetical problems of this project in an exhaustive paper that covered not only the mechanics of transmitting data over long distances (bandwidth, yeah it's like 1855) but the economics of transmitting the information. In other words, how big and of what materials would best get the volts to its destination.

He also invented a device called a siphon recorder, an electromagnetic device attached to a telegraph wire that sprayed ink on paper according to the dots and dashes. A very early ink jet printer.

Oh, still trying to figure out the title of the post? He was second wrangler at Cambridge.