Lord Rayleigh. Caricature of English physicist and Nobel Laureate Lord Rayleigh (1842-1919). This caricature was titled Argon", published in Vanity Fair in 1899. He was born John William Strutt and inherited the title Baron Rayleigh in 1873. Rayleigh had a laboratory at the family mansion where he conducted meticulous physics experiments. His book "The Theory of Sound" is a masterpiece of classical physics. Moving to Cambridge, his work included the study of energy levels in light and the Rayleigh-Jeans formula. A study of Prout's hypotheses led to Rayleigh's theories on gas densities and to the discovery of argon by Ramsay. Rayleigh won the 1904 Nobel Prize for physics."