A Holy Undertaking James Joule

The Scientist as Amateur
James Joule’s story may seem a little hard to believe. He lived near Manchester,
England—in the scientific hinterland during much of Joule’s career—where his
family operated a brewery, making ale and porter. He did some of his most important
workin the early morning and evening, before and after a day at the
brewery. He had no university education, and hardly any formal training at all
in science. As a scientist he was, in every way, an amateur. Like Mayer, who was
also an amateur as a physicist, Joule was ignored at first by the scientific establishment.
Yet, despite his amateur status, isolation, and neglect, he managed to
probe more deeply than anyone else at the time (the early and middle 1840s) the
tantalizing mysteries of conversion processes. And (unlike Mayer) he did not
suffer prolonged neglect. The story of Joule’s rapid progress, from dilettante to a
position of eminence in British science, can hardly be imagined in today’s world
of research factories and prolonged scientific apprenticeships