James Dewar was born on the twentieth of September, 1842, in Kincardine, Scotland. A citizen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, he received his early schooling at Dollar Academy before going on to study at the University of Edinburgh, where his formation as a scientist began to take shape.

He worked throughout his career as both a physicist and a chemist, and his practice extended into invention as well. The distinctions awarded to him across the course of that career were numerous and came from varied quarters. He received the Davy Medal, the Rumford Medal, the Copley Medal, and the Royal Society Bakerian Medal, as well as the Albert Medal, the Franklin Medal, the Hodgkins Medal, the Matteucci Medal, the Lavoisier Medal, and the Gunning Victoria Jubilee Prize. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and was appointed a Knight Bachelor.

Dewar conducted his work in English, operating within the scientific culture of the United Kingdom while drawing recognition from institutions beyond it. The range of medals and prizes bearing his name — spanning British bodies and those on the European continent — reflects a career that attracted sustained attention across more than one field. His parallel identities as physicist, chemist, and inventor gave his working life a breadth that the accumulation of those honours, in its variety, tends to confirm.

James Dewar died on the twenty-seventh of March, 1923, in London. He had lived to the age of eighty, and the Copley Medal — among the most prominent of the distinctions listed among his honours — stands as one concrete measure of the recognition his work earned during his lifetime.