Publication and Neglect

Sadi Carnot’s workwas presented as a privately published memoir in 1824, one
year after Lazare Carnot’s death, and it met a strange fate. The memoir was published
by a leading scientific publisher, favorably reviewed, mentioned in an
important journal—and then for more than twenty years all but forgotten. With
one fortunate exception, none of France’s esteemed company of engineers and
physicists paid any further attention to Carnot’s memoir.
One can only speculate concerning the reasons for this neglect. Perhaps Carnot’s
immediate audience did not appreciate his scientific writing style. Like his
father, whose scientific workwas also ignored at first, Carnot wrote in a semipopular
style. He rarely used mathematical equations, and these were usually
relegated to footnotes; most of his arguments were stated verbally. Evidently Carnot,
like his father, was writing for engineers, but his book was still too theoretical
for the steam-engine engineers who should have read it. Others of the scientific
establishment, looking for the analytical mathematical language commonly used
at the time in treatises on mechanics, probably could not take seriously this
unknown youth who insisted on using verbal science to formulate his arguments.
It didn’t help either that Carnot was personally reserved and wary of publicity
of any kind. One of his rules of conduct was, “Say little about what you know
and nothing at all about what you don’t know.” In the end, like Newton with the
Principia, Carnot missed his audience.
In time, Carnot probably would have seen his workrecognized, if not in
France, perhaps elsewhere where theoretical research on heat and heat engines
was more active. But Carnot never had the opportunity to wait for the scientific
world to catch up. In 1831, he contracted scarlet fever, which developed into
“brain fever.” He partially recovered and went to the country for convalescence.
But later, in 1832, while studying the effects of a cholera epidemic, he became a
cholera victim himself. The disease killed him in hours; he was thirty-six years
old. Most of his papers and other effects were destroyed at the time of his death,
the customary precaution following a cholera casualty.