History
The discovery of the first law of thermodynamics was by way of many tries and mistakes of investigation, over a period of about half a century. The first full statements of the law were made by Clausius in 1850 as noted above, and by Rankine also in 1850; Rankine's statement was perhaps not quite as clear and distinct as was Clausius'. A main aspect of the struggle was to deal with the previously proposed caloric theory of heat.
Germain Hess in 1840 stated a conservation law for the so-called 'heat of reaction' for chemical reactions. His law was later recognized as a consequence of the first law of thermodynamics, but Hess's statement was not explicitly concerned with the relation between energy exchanges by heat and work.
According to Truesdell (1980), Julius Robert von Mayer in 1841 made a statement that meant that "in a process at constant pressure, the heat used to produce expansion is universally interconvertible with work", but this is not a general statement of the first law.
Read more about this topic: First Law Of Thermodynamics
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Racism is an ism to which everyone in the world today is exposed; for or against, we must take sides. And the history of the future will differ according to the decision which we make.”
—Ruth Benedict (1887–1948)
“All things are moral. That soul, which within us is a sentiment, outside of us is a law. We feel its inspiration; out there in history we can see its fatal strength.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history we make today.”
—Henry Ford (1863–1947)