ABSTRACT
James Prescott Joule was born on Christmas Eve, 1819. Joule's scientific career began in 1838 when a brief letter of his was published in Sturgeon's Annals of Electricity, and it ended with his last paper, a meticulous determination of the mechanical equivalent of heat published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society for 1878, and a very short note in the Manchester Memoirs for 1879. Sturgeon's Annals of Electricity, which appeared in ten volumes between 1836 and 1843, was the first journal in the world to be devoted to the study of electricity from both the scientific and the practical points of view. It seems that British science in Joule's time was many centered and that Manchester must rank with London, Cambridge, Dublin, Edinburgh, and Glasgow as one of the main centers. But it was a unique center in that its base and inspiration were industrial and technological rather than academic.
