28 Facts About William Rankine

William Rankine was a founding contributor, with Rudolf Clausius and William Thomson, to the science of thermodynamics, particularly focusing on its First Law.

William Rankine developed the Rankine scale, a Fahrenheit-based equivalent to the Celsius-based Kelvin scale of temperature.

William Rankine published several hundred papers and notes on science and engineering topics, from 1840 onwards, and his interests were extremely varied, including, in his youth, botany, music theory and number theory, and, in his mature years, most major branches of science, mathematics and engineering.

William Rankine was a singer, pianist and cellist as well as a rifleman.

William Rankine was born in Edinburgh to Lt David Rankin, a civil engineer from a military background, who later worked on the Edinburgh and Dalkeith Railway.

William Rankine's mother was Barbara Grahame, of a prominent legal and banking family.

William Rankine's father moved around Scotland on various projects and the family moved with him.

William Rankine was initially educated at home, due to his poor health, but he later attended Ayr Academy and then the High School of Glasgow.

In 1836, William Rankine began to study a spectrum of scientific topics at the University of Edinburgh, including natural history under Robert Jameson and natural philosophy under James David Forbes.

William Rankine left the University of Edinburgh in 1838 without a degree and, perhaps because of straitened family finances, became an apprentice to Sir John Benjamin Macneill, who was at the time surveyor to the Irish Railway Commission.

William Rankine served as the Society's Vice President from 1871 to 1872.

William Rankine died at 8 Albion Crescent, Dowanhill, Glasgow at 11:45pm on Christmas Eve, 24 December 1872, aged only 52.

William Rankine's death was registered by his uncle, Alex Grahame.

William Rankine accurately predicted the surprising fact that the apparent specific heat of saturated steam would be negative.

William Rankine later recast the results of his molecular theories in terms of a macroscopic account of energy and its transformations.

William Rankine defined and distinguished between actual energy which was lost in dynamic processes and potential energy by which it was replaced.

William Rankine assumed the sum of the two energies to be constant, an idea already, although surely not for very long, familiar in the law of conservation of energy.

In 1862, William Rankine expanded Lord Kelvin's theory of universal heat death and, along with Kelvin himself, formulated the heat death paradox, which disproves the possibility of an infinitely old universe.

William Rankine first performed an analysis of a spinning shaft in 1869, but his model was not adequate and he predicted that supercritical speeds could not be attained.

William Rankine was one of the first engineers to recognise that fatigue failures of railway axles was caused by the initiation and growth of brittle cracks.

William Rankine showed that the axles had failed by progressive growth of a brittle crack from a shoulder or other stress concentration source on the shaft, such as a keyway.

William Rankine was supported by similar direct analysis of failed axles by Joseph Glynn, where the axles failed by slow growth of a brittle crack in a process now known as metal fatigue.

William Rankine presented his conclusions in a paper delivered to the Institution of Civil Engineers.

William Rankine's work was ignored however, by many engineers who persisted in believing that stress could cause "re-crystallisation" of the metal, a myth which has persisted even to recent times.

William Rankine served as Regius Professor of Civil Engineering and Mechanics at the University of Glasgow from November 1855 until his death in December 1872, pursuing engineering research along a number of lines in civil and mechanical engineering.

The William Rankine Lectures, organised by the British Geotechnical Association, are named in recognition of the significant contributions William Rankine made to:.

William Rankine worked closely with Clyde shipbuilders, especially his friend and lifelong collaborator James Robert Napier, to make naval architecture into an engineering science.

William Rankine was an early member of the Royal Institution of Naval Architects and attended many of its annual meetings.