Frederick Thomas Trouton

Frederick Thomas Trouton (* November 24, 1863 in Dublin, † September 21, 1922 in Downe ) was an Irish experimental physicist. Trouton was known by the Pictet- Trouton rule, the Trouton -Noble experiment and the Trouton - Rankine experiment.

Trouton came from a wealthy family in Dublin and studied at Trinity College in Dublin. A brilliant engineering student ( he was involved in, for example, while still a student at surveying work for planned railway lines ) and physics he received before the graduation, the Gold Medal of the University. The Pictet - Trouton rule that for many liquids the entropy per mole during evaporation is the same, he discovered while still a student by comparison of measured values ​​in textbooks.

In 1884 he became assistant to George Francis FitzGerald, who took seriously one of the few Maxwell's theory of electromagnetic waves and right after the announcement of the experiments of Heinrich Hertz took up this (Lecture British Association 1888) and Trouton encouraged to work in this field. This led, together with his students Noble Trouton - Noble experiment in which Trouton originally envisioned to gain from the movement of the earth against the "ether" with a capacitor energy ( he expected a positive result ). The expected effects were not found.

In 1897 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society. In 1902 he participated in the Quaint Professorship of Experimental Physics at University College London, which he held up to a disease-related withdrawal end of 1914. Thereafter he lived in retirement in Tilford in Surrey and from 1922 in Downe, Kent. The last five years of his life he was paralyzed in both legs.