page_title: James Prescott Joule
section_title: Early life
hierarchical_section_title: James Prescott Joule / Early life
caption_attribution_description: James Prescott Joule
context_page_description: James Prescott Joule was an English physicist, born in Salford, near Manchester. In his time he had great contribution to the world of electricity and thermodynamics. He was best known for discovering Joule's law, which described electric heating by saying the amount of heat produced each second in a conductor by a current of Electricity is proportional to the resistance of a conductor and to the square of the current. The unit for this is joule, equal to one watt-second. Later Joule worked with William Thomson to find out that the temperature of gas falls, as gas expands. This principle was then known as the Joule-Thomson effect.
context_section_description: The son of Benjamin Joule (1784–1858), a wealthy brewer, James Prescott Joule was born in the house next to the Joule Brewery in New Bailey Street, Salford on 24 December 1818. James was tutored at the family home  'Broomhill', Pendlebury, near Salford, until 1834 when he was sent, with his elder brother Benjamin, to study with John Dalton at the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society. They only received two years of education in arithmetic and geometry before Dalton was forced to retire because of a stroke.
caption: 1892 illustration of Joule
exif: {}