author
Balfour Stewart
1828–1887
A Scottish physicist and meteorologist, he helped shape 19th-century thinking about radiant heat, terrestrial magnetism, and the physics of the atmosphere. His work earned the Royal Society’s Rumford Medal and made him an influential scientific writer as well as a researcher.
2 Audiobooks
The conservation of energy
by Balfour Stewart
The unseen universe : or, physical speculations on a future state
by Balfour Stewart, Peter Guthrie Tait
About the author
Born in Edinburgh in 1828, Balfour Stewart first spent years in business before turning fully toward science. He went on to work at Kew Observatory, where he built a reputation through research on radiant heat and terrestrial magnetism, and later became director of the observatory.
Stewart is best remembered for showing an important connection between how bodies absorb and emit radiant heat, work that brought him the Rumford Medal of the Royal Society in 1868. He also wrote widely on physics and meteorology, helping bring difficult ideas to a broader audience.
Later in his career he served as professor of physics at Owens College in Manchester. He died in 1887, leaving behind a body of work that linked laboratory physics with the study of Earth’s magnetic and atmospheric behavior.