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:
“What you don’t understand is that it is possible to be an atheist, it is possible not to know if God exists or why He should, and yet to believe that man does not live in a state of nature but in history, and that history as we know it now began with Christ, it was founded by Him on the Gospels.”
—Boris Pasternak (1890–1960)
“The visual is sorely undervalued in modern scholarship. Art history has attained only a fraction of the conceptual sophistication of literary criticism.... Drunk with self-love, criticism has hugely overestimated the centrality of language to western culture. It has failed to see the electrifying sign language of images.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
“To history therefore I must refer for answer, in which it would be an unhappy passage indeed, which should shew by what fatal indulgence of subordinate views and passions, a contest for an atom had defeated well founded prospects of giving liberty to half the globe.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)