Plaque commemorates Joule’s energy
24th March 2019
UK: The 200th anniversary of the birth of physicist James Prescott Joule is to be commemorated with the unveiling of a plaque in Sale, Cheshire, next month.
The English physicist, mathematician and thermodynamics pioneer, who gave his name to the unit of energy, was born on December 24, 1818 in Sale.
He worked with Lord Kelvin to develop the Kelvin scale, and together came up with the Joule-Kelvin effect (aka the Joule-Thomson effect), a concept later used in refrigeration. Not content with coming up with Joule’s first law to express the relationship between heat generated and current flowing through a conductor, he also came up with a second law that states that the internal energy of an ideal gas is independent of its volume and pressure, depending only on its temperature.
To commemorate the 200th anniversary of Joule’s birth, a ceramic pavement plaque will be installed in front of the existing bronze bust of Joule in Worthington Park, Sale.
The plaque’s official unveiling will be carried out on April 12 at 11am.
Joule died in 1889, and was buried in Brooklands Cemetery, Sale. The number 772.55 engraved on his gravestone acknowledges the final
figure that he calculated in foot-pound units for the mechanical equivalent of heat.
