Sir charles whyville thomson biography of christopher
Home / Scientists & Inventors / Sir charles whyville thomson biography of christopher
The result was described by an eminent oceanographer of the day as "the greatest advance in the knowledge of our planet since the celebrated discoveries of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries".
After HMS Challenger's return, Charles Wyville Thomson received a knighthood. Were its temperatures stable, as once thought?
In 1868 and 1860, he led deep-sea dredging missions aboard HMS Lightning and HMS Porcupine, proving that life existed at depths over 1200 metres.
The Challenger, a corvette of 2,306 tons, was specially fitted up and placed under command of Captain (now Sir George) Nares, with a naval surveying staff. It wasn’t long before his passion turned toward the natural sciences, particularly botany and zoology.
By his early twenties, Thomson had already become a lecturer in botany at the University of Aberdeen.
Sir Charles Wyville Thomson is a foundational figure in marine science and oceanography. His last removal was in 1870 to the professorship of natural history in the university of Edinburgh.
Some years before he had turned his mind to questions relating to the distribution of life and the physical conditions in the deeper parts of the ocean, to which attention had already been directed by Dr.
G. C. Wallich, who in 1860 accompanied the Bulldog in a sounding voyage across the North Atlantic. The wider picture in Scotland at the time is set out in our Historical Timeline.
Charles Wyville Thomson was born in West Lothian, the son of a surgeon working for the British East India Company. This led him to undertake deep-sea dredging expeditions in 1868 and 1869 aboard HMS Lightning and HMS Porcupine.
Challenger during the year 1873 and the early part of the year 1876, by Sir C. Wyville Thomson, KNT., LL.D., D.Sc, F.R.SS.L. 1869, and was a fellow of the Linnean, Geological, Zoological, and other societies, besides receiving the honorary membership of various scientific bodies, colonial and foreign. They had proved so fruitful and suggestive that the government was strongly urged by the leading men of science in Great Britain to send out a roomy and well-equipped vessel, in order to make a series of soundings and dredgings in the three great ocean basins, to ascertain the temperature and character of the water, to collect specimens of the fauna and flora on the surface and from all possible depths, and to study as far as possible certain rarely visited oceanic islands—in fact, to make a somewhat devious voyage of circumnavigation, which was expressly guided by the desire to increase scientific knowledge.
Pioneering methodologies included:
- Lowering sounding lines with weights to measure ocean depths and collect sediment samples.
- Using dredges and trawls to collect marine organisms from various depths.
- Measuring temperature at different depths with instruments like the Miller-Casella mercury thermometer.
- Collecting water samples at standard depths for chemical analysis.
- Gathering plankton samples, with the speed and direction of ocean surface currents recorded.
Unveiling Ocean Secrets and Lasting Impact
The Challenger Expedition yielded groundbreaking scientific discoveries that reshaped ocean understanding.
Dublin, 1878, and Ph.D. A devious course took them through the Australasian islands, and they then visited Japan and the Sandwich Islands. He also resumed his university duties, delivered the Rede lecture at Cambridge in 1877, and in the following year presided over the geographical section at the meeting of the British Association in Dublin.
He studied marine invertebrates and published works on coelenterates, polyzoans, and fossilized cirripeds, trilobites, and crinoids. This undertaking took nearly 20 years to complete, providing detailed descriptions of the findings and specimens, with the last volume published in 1895.
Thomson’s work on the Challenger Expedition transformed oceanography into a modern scientific discipline based on empirical data.
Thomson was knighted in 1877, and his enduring legacy is recognized in the Wyville-Thomson Ridge in the North Atlantic, a testament to his profound impact on our understanding of the Earth’s oceans.
On World Ocean day, we take a moment to honour one of Scotland’s most remarkable contributors to marine science - Sir Charles Wyville Thomson, born at Bonsyde House, Linlithgow, in 1830.
In 1868 and 1869 he persuaded the Royal Navy to lend him two ships to undertake deep sea dredging to gain a better understanding of life down to a depth of 1200m. The work was continued in the following year, with the aid of John Gwyn Jeffreys [q.