Timeline of Thermodynamics - Before 1800

Before 1800

• 1650 – Otto von Guericke builds the first vacuum pump
• 1660 – Robert Boyle experimentally discovers Boyle's Law, relating the pressure and volume of a gas (published 1662)
• 1665 – Robert Hooke stated: "Heat being nothing else but a very brisk and vehement agitation of the parts of a body."
• 1669 – J.J. Becher puts forward a theory of combustion involving combustible earth (Latin terra pinguis).
• 1676–1689 – Gottfried Leibniz develops the concept of vis viva, a limited version of the conservation of energy
• 1679 – Denis Papin designed a steam digester which inspired the development of the piston-and-cylinder steam engine.
• 1694–1734 – Georg Ernst Stahl names Becher's combustible earth as phlogiston and develops the theory
• 1698 – Thomas Savery patented an early steam engine
• 1702 – Guillaume Amontons introduces the concept of absolute zero, based on observations of gases
• 1738 – Daniel Bernoulli publishes Hydrodynamica, initiating the kinetic theory
• 1749 – Émilie du Châtelet, in her French translation and commentary on Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, derives the conservation of energy from the first principles of Newtonian mechanics.
• 1761 – Joseph Black discovers that ice absorbs heat without changing its temperature when melting
• 1772 – Black's student Daniel Rutherford discovers nitrogen, which he calls phlogisticated air, and together they explain the results in terms of the phlogiston theory
• 1776 – John Smeaton publishes a paper on experiments related to power, work, momentum, and kinetic energy, supporting the conservation of energy
• 1777 – Carl Wilhelm Scheele distinguishes heat transfer by thermal radiation from that by convection and conduction
• 1783 – Antoine Lavoisier discovers oxygen and develops an explanation for combustion; in his paper "Réflexions sur le phlogistique", he deprecates the phlogiston theory and proposes a caloric theory
• 1784 – Jan Ingenhousz describes Brownian motion of charcoal particles on water
• 1791 – Pierre Prévost shows that all bodies radiate heat, no matter how hot or cold they are
• 1798 – Count Rumford (Benjamin Thompson) performs measurements of the frictional heat generated in boring cannons and develops the idea that heat is a form of kinetic energy; his measurements are inconsistent with caloric theory, but are also sufficiently imprecise as to leave room for doubt.