Sir Joseph John Thomson.

Joseph John Thomson--who would be known throughout his life by family, friends, and colleagues as "J. J."--was born the son of a publisher and bookseller in a suburb of Manchester, England. It was intended that the young Thomson become an engineer and be apprenticed to a maker of steam-driven locomotives, but the waiting list was so long that his father took the advice of a friend and instead sent the fourteen-year-old student to a local college. At Owens College, which in 1880 became Manchester University, Thomson studied mathematics, engineering, and physics under challenging teachers. The early death of his father, however, forced him to reconsider a projected career in engineering, since the cost of the required apprenticeship was beyond his family's means. He therefore studied for an entrance scholarship at Trinity College, at Cambridge University, where he was admitted. Thomson would spend the rest of his life at Trinity. Thomson completed his undergraduate work in 1880 when he took his examinations for the mathematical tripos over nine bleak January days. Among the examiners was the theoretical physicist James Clerk Maxwell, who is best known for his contributions to electromagnetic field theory. Following. the successful completion of these examinations, Thomson wrote a dissertation about energy that resulted in two papers published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. Thomson's thesis won for him a fellowship at the university, where he began teaching and initiating a line of research in electrical theory that would point him in the direction of his most important work. It was at this time that he began his association with the recently founded Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge. The laboratory was virtually unique in its day for providing both equipment and space for teaching and research in physics. INSET: Sir Joseph John Thomson.