page_title: James Prescott Joule
section_title: Honours
hierarchical_section_title: James Prescott Joule / Honours
caption_attribution_description: English: Joule's gravestone
context_page_description: James Prescott Joule FRS FRSE was an English physicist, mathematician and brewer, born in Salford, Lancashire. Joule studied the nature of heat, and discovered its relationship to mechanical work. This led to the law of conservation of energy, which in turn led to the development of the first law of thermodynamics. The SI derived unit of energy, the joule, is named after him.
  He worked with Lord Kelvin to develop an absolute thermodynamic temperature scale, which came to be called the Kelvin scale. Joule also made observations of magnetostriction, and he found the relationship between the current through a resistor and the heat dissipated, which is also called Joule's first law. His experiments about energy transformations were first published in 1843.
context_section_description: Joule died at home in Sale and is buried in Brooklands cemetery there. His gravestone is inscribed with the number "772.55", his climacteric 1878 measurement of the mechanical equivalent of heat, in which he found that this amount of foot-pounds of work must be expended at sea level to raise the temperature of one pound of water from 60 to 61 °F. This is also a quotacion from the Gospel of John: "I must work the work of him that sent me, while it is day: the night cometh, when no man can work". The Wetherspoon's pub in Sale, the town of his death, is named "The J. P. Joule" after him. Joule's family brewery survives to this day but is now located in Market Drayton.
  Joule's many honours and commendations include:
  Fellow of the Royal Society (1850)
  Royal Medal (1852), 'For his paper on the mechanical equivalent of heat, printed in the Philosophical Transactions for 1850'
  Copley Medal (1870), 'For his experimental researches on the dynamical theory of heat'
  President of Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society (1860)
  President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (1872, 1887)
  Honorary Membership of the Institution of Engineers and Shipbuilders in Scotland (1857)
  Honorary degrees:
  LL.D., Trinity College, Dublin (1857)
  DCL, University of Oxford (1860)
  LL.D., University of Edinburgh (1871)
  Joule received a civil list pension of £200 per annum in 1878 for services to science
  Albert Medal of the Royal Society of Arts (1880), 'for having established, after most laborious research, the true relation between heat, electricity and mechanical work, thus affording to the engineer a sure guide in the application of science to industrial pursuits'
  There is a memorial to Joule in the north choir aisle of Westminster Abbey, though he is not buried there, contrary to what some biographies state. A statue of Joule by Alfred Gilbert stands in Manchester Town Hall, opposite that of Dalton.
caption: Joule's gravestone in Brooklands cemetery, Sale
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