Royal Society: archive catalogue (catalogues.royalsociety.org) and Royal Society Publishing (royalsocietypublishing.org), 2026-10-08

Investigator run 1, Jeans-JH. Priority 4 (historical record) and 1. Chrome.

1. Sir James Hopwood Jeans Papers, ref. JHJ (Royal Society archive)

URL: https://catalogues.royalsociety.org/calmview/Record.aspx?src=CalmView.Catalog&id=JHJ [web] - Dates 1896-1945; 13 boxes (1 outsize) and 9 notebooks; access open. - Description (paraphrase): early Trinity lecture notebooks. A collection of letters, 1901-1907, "documents Jeans' treatment for tuberculosis at Ringwood Sanatorium, Hampshire, and Mundesley Sanatorium, Norfolk, where he completed work on the theory of gases"; correspondents include G. H. Hardy and Adam Sedgwick. Then BBC and Royal Institution talks (1930s-40s), correspondence on spiritualism with Arthur Conan Doyle, offprints, and a death mask. - Arrangement: 1 Notebooks; 2 Correspondence with Jeans, 1901-1907; 3 Talks and Lectures (only 1930-1945; JHJ/3 checked); 4 Publications; 5 Drafts and manuscripts (JHJ/5 checked: "Mostly manuscript and typescript drafts of 'Astronomy & Cosmogony' (1928)"); 6 Reviews; 7 Death mask. - Related material listed: Milne's obituary (below); Royal Society MC letters (25 Feb 1903 re an addition to a submitted paper, MC/03124; 14 May 1906 re his election while at Princeton, MC/06329; 1917 Bakerian Lecture); correspondence with Arthur Schuster (SC/99). Elsewhere: Nuffield College Oxford (Lord Cherwell, 1916-31); Caltech Archives (George Hale, 1917-32); Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin, "23 letters to Sir Owen Richardson"; British Library (Marie Stopes, 1934-57). - The administrative history states that his 1914 "Report on Radiation and the Quantum Theory... helped spread acceptance of quantum theory". - Bearing: JHJ/2 (1901-1907 sanatorium letters, written while he finished the gas theory) is the archive most likely to hold his working thoughts on the 1904 dissipative theory (claims 1-2). The Richardson letters at HRC are a lead for the 1925 photoelectric and quantum views (Richardson worked on the photoelectric effect and thermionics [memory, high]). No item for the 1925 Rouse Ball lecture was seen in JHJ/3 or JHJ/5. The CalmView keyword search ("Jeans quanta") returned "There was a problem searching the database"; item-level browsing of JHJ/2, JHJ/4 and JHJ/6 was not done.

2. E. A. Milne, "James Hopwood Jeans, 1877-1946", Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society 5 (15), 573-589 (Feb 1947)

URL: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsbm.1947.0019, marked "Free". PDF: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rsbm/article-pdf/5/15/573/181656/rsbm.1947.0019.pdf [web] - Result: partial. The page loads in Chrome. Scripted download (curl) returns a bot-check page, and the in-site PDF viewer exposes no text, so the memoir was not read this run. JSTOR also lists it (Google result), with a bibliography that includes "1926. Atomicity and quanta. Rouse Ball Lecture, 1925, 64 pp." [web, snippet]. - Lead: read Milne for how a close colleague described the 1904 gas theory, the 1910 conversion and the 1925 lecture. Next run: open the PDF in Chrome and read it from page images.