Balfour Stewart
| Balfour Stewart | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Born | 1 November 1828 Edinburgh, Scotland |
| Died | 19 December 1887 (aged 59) Ballymagarvey, Balrath, County Meath, Ireland |
| Citizenship | British |
| Nationality | Scottish |
| Fields | Physics |
| Institutions | Kew Observatory, Owens College, Manchester |
| Alma mater | University of St. Andrews University of Edinburgh |
| Doctoral advisor | James David Forbes |
| Known for | Heat, Meteorology, & Terrestrial Magnetism |
| Notable awards | Rumford Medal (1868) |
Balfour Stewart (1 November 1828 – 19 December 1887) was a Scottish physicist. His studies in the field of radiant heat led to him receiving the Rumford Medal of the Royal Society in 1868. In 1859 he was appointed director of Kew Observatory. He was elected professor of physics at Owens College, Manchester, and retained that chair until his death, which happened near Drogheda, in Ireland, on 19 December 1887. He was the author of several successful science textbooks, and also of the article on "Terrestrial Magnetism" in the ninth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica.
Stewart was born in Edinburgh, and was educated at Dundee, the University of St Andrews, and the University of Edinburgh. The son of a tea merchant, he was for some time engaged in business in Leith and in Australia, but, returning to his studies of physics at Edinburgh, he became assistant to J. D. Forbes in 1856. Forbes was especially interested in questions of heat, meteorology, and terrestrial magnetism, and it was to these that Stewart also mainly devoted himself.
Radiant heat first claimed his attention, and by 1858 he had completed his first investigations into the subject. These yielded a remarkable extension of Pierre Prévost's "Law of Exchanges," and enabled him to establish the fact that radiation is not a surface phenomenon, but takes place throughout the interior of the radiating body, and that the radiative and absorptive powers of a substance must be equal, not only for the radiation as a whole, but also for every constituent of it.
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