In 1873 he took thermoelectricity for the subject of his discourse as Rede lecturer at Cambridge, and in the same year he presented the first sketch of his well-known thermoelectric diagram before the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
Klemencig devised a form of thermal receiver depending on thermoelectricity.
The diagram constructed by Tait on this principle is fully explained and illustrated in many text-books, and has been generally adopted as embodying in a simple form the fundamental phenomena of thermoelectricity.
The majority of these theories are too vague to be profitably discussed in an article like the present, but there can be little doubt that the study of thermoelectricity affords one of the most promising roads to the discovery of the true relations between heat and electricity.
