John Waterson (physicist)

John Waterson (1811-1883?), a Scot born in Edinburgh, was originally a railway civil engineer, moving to India in 1839 for the East India Company. He retired back to Edinburgh in 1857 and devoted the rest of his life to physics research. He disappeared on the 18th of June, 1883.

As a physicist Waterson was the first to develop the basic idea the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution and other aspects of thermodynamics. He anticipated the idea of the sun being powered by its gravitational contraction (later rediscovered independently by Hermann von Helmholtz, Julius Robert von Mayer and Lord Kelvin). In all this work he was largely ignored; the thermodynamics paper on gases and specific heats he sent to the Royal Society in 1845 (from India) was only published in 1892.