Entropy and The Second Law
Even though he was working with the caloric theory, Sadi Carnot in 1824 suggested that some of the caloric available for generating useful work is lost in any real process. In March 1851, while grappling to come to terms with the work of James Prescott Joule, Lord Kelvin started to speculate that there was an inevitable loss of useful heat in all processes. The idea was framed even more dramatically by Hermann von Helmholtz in 1854, giving birth to the spectre of the heat death of the universe.
In 1854, William John Macquorn Rankine started to make use in calculation of what he called his thermodynamic function. This has subsequently been shown to be identical to the concept of entropy formulated by Rudolf Clausius in 1865. Clausius used the concept to develop his classic statement of the second law of thermodynamics the same year.
Read more about this topic: History Of Thermodynamics
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