Lord Rayleigh: John William Strutt, third Baron Rayleigh

Abstract

John William Strutt, first son of the second Baron Rayleigh, was born on November 12, 1842. He was a sickly boy, so his schooling was sporadic. Nevertheless, he graduated first in his year at Cambridge and subsequently was a Fellow of Trinity College until his marriage in 1871. His father died in 1873, and he succeeded to the title third Baron Rayleigh. He converted the stable block of his country house, Terling Place, into a laboratory. In 1879, he moved back to Cambridge as Professor of Experimental Physics, but he returned to Terling in 1884. He published The Theory of Sound in 1877/1878 and, in his lifetime, 466 scientific articles. He received the 1904 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of argon and made numerous seminal contributions to scientific progress. In the field of acoustics, he studied scattering, the diffraction limit, surface waves, resonance phenomena, reciprocity, streaming, radiation force, cavitation, relaxation, and binaural perception. He received many honors, was President of the Royal Society, one of the founding members of the Order of Merit, and Chancellor of Cambridge University. He also was interested in psychical research. Lord Rayleigh died on June 30, 1919.