Thomas Andrews (scientist)
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| Thomas Andrews | |
|---|---|
| Born | December 19, 1813 Belfast, Ireland |
| Died | November 26, 1885 (age 71) |
| Occupation | chemist and physicist |
Thomas Andrews (December 19, 1813–November 26, 1885), was an Irish chemist and physicist who did important work on phase transitions between gases and liquids.
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[edit] Life
Born in Belfast, Ireland (UK) where his father was a linen merchant he attended the Belfast Academy and the Academical Institution. In 1828 he went to the University of Glasgow to study chemistry under Professor Thomas Thomson. He then moved to Trinity College, Dublin, where he gained distinction in classics as well as in science.
He graduated as M.D. from the University of Edinburgh in 1835, and settled down to a successful medical practice in his native Belfast, also giving instruction in chemistry at the Academical Institution. Ten years later he was appointed vice-president of the newly established Queen's University of Belfast, and professor of chemistry there. He held these two offices until 1879, when failing health compelled his retirement.
[edit] Work
Andrews first became known as a scientific investigator with his work on the heat developed in chemical actions, for which the Royal Society awarded him a Royal Medal in 1844. Another important investigation, undertaken in collaboration with Peter Guthrie Tait, was devoted to ozone.
The work on which his reputation mainly rests, and which best displayed his experimental skill and resourcefulness, was concerned with the liquefaction of gases. He carried out a very complete inquiry into the laws expressing the relations of pressure, temperature and volume in carbon dioxide. In particular he established the concepts of critical temperature and critical pressure, showing that the gas passes from the gaseous to the liquid state without any breach of continuity.
[edit] Thermodynamics
Andrew's experiments on phase transitions, published in Phil. Trans., vol. 159, pg. 575, which showed that carbonic acid may be carried from any of the states which we usually call liquid to any of those which we usually call gas, without losing its homogeneity, were cited in by the American mathematical physicist Willard Gibbs in his 1873 paper A Method of Geometrical Representation of the Thermodynamic Properties of Substances by Means of Surfaces. These results were used in support of the development of the Gibbs free energy equation, which is used to determine, in the words of Gibbs, “what determines the direction of discontinuous change.”
[edit] Bibliography
His scientific papers were published in a collected form in 1889, with a memoir by Professors Tait and Crum Brown.
[edit] References
This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
[edit] Further reading
- Scott, E.L.. (1970). "Andrews, Thomas". Dictionary of Scientific Biography 1: 160-161. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.
