June 25

Born on the 26th in 1824, William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin, was a true visionary in the world the physical sciences. In addition to the development of the Kelvin scale of absolute temperature measurement, he left his fingerprints all over the emerging tool of transatlantic telegraphy. The honors he received during his lifetime are many and varied. He had a long string of letters after his name, which when strung together are really rather impressive. His rather keen powers of observation of the world around him led him to proclaim, in 1895, that “heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible” and in 1897 “Radio has no future.”