John James Waterston

John James Waterston (1811 – 18 June 1883) was a Scottish physicist and a neglected pioneer of the kinetic theory of gases.

He studied mathematics and physics under Sir John Leslie as well as attending lectures in chemistry, anatomy and surgery and becoming an active participant in the student literary society.

At age nineteen, Waterston published a paper proposing a mechanical explanation of gravitation,[1] accounting for action at a distance in terms of colliding particles and discussing interactions between linear and rotational motion that would play a part in his later kinetic theory.

Waterston moved to London at age twenty-one, where he worked as a railroad surveyor, becoming an associate of the Institution of Civil Engineers and publishing a paper on a graphical method for planning earthworks.

The travel and disruption associated with his surveying work left Waterston little time to pursue his studies so he joined the hydrography department of the Admiralty under Francis Beaufort.

It was Beaufort who, in 1839, supported Waterston for the post of naval instructor for cadets of the East India Company in Bombay.

Unable to retrieve a copy of his paper (he had failed to make a copy for himself before submitting the paper to the Royal Society), he rewrote the work and sought to advertise it elsewhere, attracting little attention other than from William John Macquorn Rankine and Hermann von Helmholtz through whom it may have influenced August Krönig.

The theory gained acceptance only when it was proposed by Rudolf Clausius and James Clerk Maxwell in the 1850s by which time Waterston's contribution had been forgotten.

He returned to Edinburgh in 1857 to pursue his own novel physical ideas but met with unyielding neglect and discouragement from the scientific establishment.

Perhaps one may go further, and say that a young author who believes himself capable of great things would usually do well to secure favourable recognition of the scientific world by work whose scope is limited, and whose value is easily judged, before embarking upon higher flights."