James Prescott was born in Lancashire in 1818 24th of December. His father, Benjamin Joule was a rich brewer. His mother was known as Alice Prescott. Because of his health issues, James was majorly schooled at home. Under the supervision of John Dalton at the Manchester Literary and Philosophical society, James studied Geometry and arithmetic (Cardwell, 2017). When he was fifteen years, he began to work in the brewery besides his studies. James experimented with electricity and a servant girl which he unknowingly often gave an electric shock. James studied the nature of heat and the correlation between heat and mechanical work. Of more significance, James put up a base for the theory of energy conservation which would later inspire the first law of thermodynamics. Also, James Prescott designed the Joule's law. The law deals with the transfer of energy.
James' first experiment was on the electric motors with an intention of replacing the steam engines with electric ones in the brewery. To affect this, he discovered joules law. He also discovered the connection between the flow of current through a resistant and the generation of heat. Joule's law indicates that the amount of heat which is generated per second and develops in the wire with the current is equal to the square of the current and the electrical resistance of the wire (Cardwell, 2017). This experiment and its results were expanded in the eminent paper, on the mechanical equivalent of heat. Through this, they discovered that mechanical work and heat are all forms of energy. James collaborated with Lord Kelvin to come up with the scale of temperature. He also carried research on magnetostriction (de Queirós, Nardi & Delizoicov, 2014). This is a property which makes the magnetic materials to change their shapes when near a magnetic field. Joule is also accredited with the calculation of gas molecule.
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References
Cardwell, D. (2017). Science and Technology: The Work of James Prescott Joule. In The Development of Science and Technology in Nineteenth-Century Britain (pp. IX-674). Routledge.
de Queirós, W. P., Nardi, R., & Delizoicov, D. (2014). A technical-scientific production of James Prescott Joule&58; a reading from the epistemology of Ludwik Fleck. Investigações em Ensino de Ciências , 19 (1), 99-116.
