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:
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“The history of all previous societies has been the history of class struggles.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“Perhaps universal history is the history of the diverse intonation of some metaphors.”
—Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986)