History of Heat - Early Views

Early Views

The ancients viewed heat as that related to fire. The ancient Egyptians in 3000 BC viewed heat as related to origin mythologies. One example, is the theory of the Ogdoad, or the “primordial forces”, from which all was formed. These were the elements of chaos, numbered in eight, that existed before the creation of the sun.

The first to have put forward a semblance of a theory on heat was the Greek philosopher Heraclitus who lived around 500 BC in the city of Ephesus in Ionia, Asia Minor. He became famous as the "flux and fire" philosopher for his proverbial utterance: "All things are flowing." Heraclitus argued that the three principal elements in nature were fire, earth, and water. Of these three, however, fire is assigned as the central element controlling and modifying the other two. The universe was postulated to be in a continuous state of flux or permanent condition of change as a result of transformations of fire. Heraclitus summarized his philosophy as: "All things are an exchange for fire."

As early as 460 BC Hippocrates, the father of medicine, postulated that:

Heat, a quantity which functions to animate, derives from an internal fire located in the left ventricle.

In the 11th century AD, Abū Rayhān Bīrūnī cites movement and friction as causes of heat, which in turn produces the element of fire, and a lack of movement as the cause of cold near the geographical poles:

The earth and the water form one globe, surrounded on all sides by air. Then, since much of the air is in contact with the sphere of the moon, it becomes heated in consequence of the movement and friction of the parts in contact. Thus there is produced fire, which surrounds the air, less in amount in the proximity of the poles owing to the slackening of the movement there.

In the 13th century, the Islamic philosopher and theologian ʻAbd Allah Baydawi considered two possibilities for the cause of heat:

a) that would be the heat of a fiery atom that is broken, and b) that heat may occur through motion-change, the proof of this being through experiment.

In 1253, a Latin text entitled Speculum Tripartitum stated:

Avicenna says in his book of heaven and earth, that heat is generated from motion in external things.

Around 1600, the English philosopher and scientist Francis Bacon surmised that:

Heat itself, its essence and quiddity is motion and nothing else.

This echoed the mid-17th century view of English scientist Robert Hooke, who stated:

Heat being nothing else but a brisk and vehement agitation of the parts of a body.