The work of Thomas Andrews and James Thomson on the liquefaction of gases

Abstract

Andrews and Thomson worked in Belfast on the liquefaction of gases during the 1860s and early 1870s but much of their work was, for several reasons, not published until many years after it was done, and then only in part. Their surviving notebooks and letters show that their results anticipate some of the better-known and more systematic work of the Dutch school of van der Waals and Kamerlingh Onnes in the 1890s. The dating of the experiments and ideas of Andrews and Thomson on the continuity of the two fluid states and on the unusual behaviour of gas mixtures on liquefaction is the subject of this paper.