Three Laws of Nature by R. Stephen Berry

Author:R. Stephen Berry [Berry, R. Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300238785
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2019-01-15T07:00:00+00:00

Figure 14. James Prescott Joule. (Courtesy of Wikimedia)

William Thomson, who became Lord Kelvin of Largs in 1892 (Fig. 15), and his older brother James played very important roles in the next steps in developing the science of energy. Working first in Glasgow, a center at least as important for the field as Manchester, they focused first on the efficiency of engines of various kinds. Both steam and heated air were the driving materials in the heat engines of that time, which by midcentury had replaced water-powered pumps. William devised a temperature scale, taking the freezing point and boiling point of water as the fixed points, with regular steps or degrees between them. His scale was essentially identical to the one developed by Anders Celsius in 1742, a century earlier. Thomson introduced the term “thermodynamic” in a crucial paper of 1849, in which he analyzed the work of Sadi Carnot—having finally found and read Carnot’s nearly forgotten book. He connected that analysis to the experiments by Clapeyron and by Victor Regnault (Fig. 16), measuring the ratio of the work done to compress a gas to the heat released by that compression. Specifically, these experiments were meant to determine a quantity fundamental to quantification of Carnot’s analysis, the maximum amount of work that could be done by a temperature change of 1°.

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