Balfour Stewart (November 1, 1828 - December 19, 1887), Scottish physicist, was born in Edinburgh, and was educated at the university of that city. November 1 is the 305th day of the year (306th in leap years) in the Gregorian Calendar, with 60 days remaining. ... 1828 was a leap year starting on Tuesday (see link for calendar). ... December 19 is the 353rd day of the year (354th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... 1887 is a common year starting on Saturday (click on link for calendar). ... Scotland (Alba in Scottish Gaelic) is a country in northwest Europe, occupying the northern third of the island of Great Britain. ... Edinburghs location in Scotland Edinburgh viewed from Arthurs Seat. ... The University of Edinburgh, founded in 1583, is a renowned centre for teaching and research in Edinburgh, Scotland. ...

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 JD 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. Former Royal Yacht Britannia is permanently moored at Leith harbour. ... James David Forbes (April 20, 1809 - December 31, 1868) was a Scottish physicist who worked extensively on the conduction of heat, seismology and glaciology. ... 1856 was a leap year starting on Tuesday (see link for calendar). ... Cumulus clouds Meteorology is the scientific study of the atmosphere that focuses on weather processes and forecasting. ... Earths magnetic field (the surface magnetic field) is approximately a magnetic dipole, with one pole near the geographic north pole and the other near the geographic south pole. ...

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. 1858 is a common year starting on Friday. ... Pierre Prévost (3 March 1751 - 8 April 1839) was a Swiss philosopher and physicist. ...

In recognition of this work he received in 1868 the Rumford Medal of the Royal Society, into which he had been elected six years before. Of other papers in which he dealt with this and kindred branches of physics may be mentioned "Observations with a Rigid Spectroscope," "Heating of a Disc by Rapid Motion in Vacuo," "Thermal Equilibrium in an Enclosure Containing Matter in Visible Motion," and "Internal Radiation in Uniaxal Crystals." 1868 was a leap year starting on Wednesday (see link for calendar). ... Not to be confused with the Rumford Prize In 1796, Benjamin Thompson, known as Count Rumford, gave $5000 separately to the Royal Society of London and the other by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences to give awards every two years for outstanding scientific research on heat or light. ... The Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge, known simply as the Royal Society, is claimed to be the oldest learned society still in existence. ...

In 1879 he was appointed director of Kew Observatory, and there naturally became interested in problems of meteorology and terrestrial magnetism. In 1870, the year in which he was very seriously injured in a railway accident, he was elected professor of physics at Owens College, Manchester, and retained that chair until his death, which happened near Drogheda, in Ireland, on the 19th of December 1887. 1879 was a common year starting on Wednesday (see link for calendar). ... 1870 was a common year starting on Saturday (see link for calendar). ... The Victoria University of Manchester (almost always referred to as simply the University of Manchester) was a university in Manchester in England. ... Drogheda (Droichead Átha in Irish, meaning Fordbridge) is an industrial and port town in County Louth on the east coast of Ireland, 56 km north of Dublin. ...

He was the author of several successful textbooks of science, and also of the article on "Terrestrial Magnetism" in the ninth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. In conjunction with Professor PG Tait he wrote The Unseen Universe, at first published anonymously, which was intended to combat the common notion of the incompatibility of science and religion. Peter Tait Peter Guthrie Tait (April 28, 1831 - July 4, 1901) was a Scottish physicist. ...

This article incorporates text from the public domain 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica. The public domain comprises the body of all creative works and other knowledge—writing, artwork, music, science, inventions, and others—in which no person or organization has any proprietary interest. ... The Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica (1911) in many ways represents the sum of knowledge at the beginning of the 20th century. ...