George Johnstone Stoney
| George Johnstone Stoney | |
|---|---|
,Undated(DateGuessedEarly1890s).jpg) |
|
| Born |
15 February 1826 Oakley Park, Birr, County Offaly, Ireland |
| Died | 5 July 1911 (aged 85) Notting Hill, London, England |
| Residence | Ireland, England |
| Nationality | Irish |
| Fields | Physics |
| Institutions | Queen's College Galway, Queen's University of Ireland |
| Alma mater | Trinity College, Dublin |
| Known for | The Stoney scale, Electron |
| Influenced | J. J. Thomson |
George Johnstone Stoney FRS (15 February 1826 – 5 July 1911) was an Anglo-Irish physicist. He is most famous for introducing the term electron as the "fundamental unit quantity of electricity".
He had introduced the concept, though not the word, as early as 1874, initially naming it "Electrine", and the word itself came in 1891. He published around 75 scientific papers during his lifetime.
Stoney was born at Oakley Park, near Birr, County Offaly, in the Irish Midlands, the son of George Stoney (1792–) and Anne Blood (1801–1883). The Stoney family is an old-established Anglo-Irish family. He attended Trinity College, Dublin, graduating with a B.A. degree in 1848. From 1848 to 1852 he worked as an astronomy assistant to William Parsons, 3rd Earl of Rosse at Birr Castle, County Offaly, where Parsons had built the world's largest telescope, the 72-inch Leviathan of Parsonstown. Simultaneously Stoney continued to study physics and mathematics and was awarded an M.A. by Trinity College Dublin in 1852.
From 1852 to 1857, Stoney was professor of physics at Queen's College Galway. From 1857 to 1882, he was employed as Secretary of the Queen's University of Ireland, an administrative job based in Dublin. In the early 1880,s he moved to the post of superintendent of Civil Service Examinations in Ireland, a post he held until his retirement in 1893. In that year, he took up residence in London, England. Stoney died in 1911 at his home in Notting Hill, London. During his decades of non-scientific employment responsibilities in Dublin, Stoney continued to do scientific research on his own. He also served for decades as honorary secretary and then vice-president of the Royal Dublin Society, a scientific society modelled after the Royal Society of London, and after his move to London Stoney served on the council of that society too. Additionally he intermittently served on scientific review committees of the British Association for the Advancement of Science from the early 1860s on.
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