John William Strutt
1842 - 1919
John William Strutt, third Baron Rayleigh, was born on November 12, 1842 at Langford Grove, Maldon, Essex, as the son of John James Strutt, second Baron, and his wife Clara Elizabeth La Touche, eldest daughter of Captain Richard Vicars, R. E. He was one of the very few members of higher nobility who won fame as an outstanding scientist.
In 1879 he was appointed to follow James Clerk Maxwell as Professor of Experimental Physics and Head of the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge. In 1884 he left Cambridge to continue his experimental work at his country seat at Terling, Essex, and from 1887 to 1905 he was Professor of Natural Philosophy in the Royal Institution of Great Britain, being successor of Tyndall.
He served for six years as President of a Government Committee on Explosives, and from 1896 to 1919 he was Scientific Advisor to Trinity House. He was Lord Lieutenant of Essex from 1892 to 1901.
Lord Rayleigh's first researches were mainly mathematical, concerning optics and vibrating systems, but his later work ranged over almost the whole field of physics, covering sound, wave theory, colour vision, electrodynamics, electromagnetism, light scattering, flow of liquids, hydrodynamics, density of gases, viscosity, capillarity, elasticity, and photography. His patient and delicate experiments led to the establishment of the standards of resistance, current, and electromotive force; and his later work was concentrated on electric and magnetic problems. Lord Rayleigh was an excellent instructor and, under his active supervision, a system of practical instruction in experimental physics was devised at Cambridge, developing from a class of five or six students to an advanced school of some seventy experimental physicists. His Theory of Sound was published in two volumes during 1877-1878, and his other extensive studies are reported in his Scientific Papers - six volumes issued during 1889-1920. He has also contributed to the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
He was awarded the 1904 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of the gas Argon.
Lord Rayleigh, a former Chancellor of Cambridge University, was a Justice of the Peace and the recipient of honorary science and law degrees. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society (1873) and served as Secretary from 1885 to 1896, and as President from 1905 to 1908. He was an original recipient of the Order of Merit (1902), and in 1905 he was made a Privy Councillor. He was awarded the Copley, Royal, and Rumford Medals of the Royal Society, and the Nobel Prize for 1904.
In 1871 he married Evelyn, sister of the future prime minister, the Earl of Balfour, and daughter of James Maitland Balfour and his wife Blanche, the daughter of the second Marquis of Salisbury. They had three sons, the eldest of whom (Robert John Strutt) was to become Professor of Physics at Imperial College of Science and Technology, London.
Lord Rayleigh died on June 30, 1919, at Witham, Essex.
Kostas Gavroglu, ‘Strutt, John William, third Baron Rayleigh (1842–1919)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, May 2007 [http://www.oxforddnb.com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/view/article/36359, accessed 20 July 2015