First Law of Thermodynamics - History

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:

    No matter how vital experience might be while you lived it, no sooner was it ended and dead than it became as lifeless as the piles of dry dust in a school history book.
    Ellen Glasgow (1874–1945)

    Every library should try to be complete on something, if it were only the history of pinheads.
    Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809–1894)

    It’s nice to be a part of history but people should get it right. I may not be perfect, but I’m bloody close.
    John Lydon (formerly Johnny Rotten)