Rejection

Mayer submitted his 1841 paper to Johann Poggendorff’s Annalen der Physik und
Chemie. It was not accepted for publication, or even returned with an acknowledgment.
But, according to one of Mayer’s biographers, R. Bruce Lindsay, the
careless treatment was a blessing in disguise. Mayer’s detailed arguments in the
paper were “based on a profound misunderstanding of mechanics.” Although the
rejection was a blow to Mayer’s pride, “it was a good thing for [his] subsequent
reputation that [the paper] did not see the light of day.”
If Mayer had great pride, he had even more perseverance. With help from his
friend Carl Baur (later a professor of mathematics in Stuttgart), he improved the
paper, expanded it in several ways, and at last saw it published in Justus von
Liebig’s Annalen der Chemie und Pharmacie in 1842. Mayer’s most important
addition to the paper was a calculation of the mechanical effect, workdone in
the expansion of a gas, produced by a thermal effect, the heating of the gas. This
was an evaluation of the “mechanical equivalent of heat,” a concern independently
occupying Joule at about the same time. Whether or not Mayer made the
first such calculation became the subject of a celebrated controversy. One thing
that weakened Mayer’s priority claim was that he omitted all details but the result
in his calculation in the 1842 paper. Not until 1845, in a more extended paper,
did he make his method clear. By 1845, Joule was reporting impressive experimental
measurements of the mechanical equivalent of heat.
In the 1842 paper, Mayer based his ultimately famous calculation on the experimental
fact that it takes more heat to raise the temperature of a gas held at
constant pressure than at constant volume. Mayer could see in the difference
between the constant-pressure and constant-volume results a measure of the heat
converted to an equivalent amount of workdone by the gas when it expands
against constant pressure. He could also calculate that work, and the work-toheat
ratio, was a numerical evaluation of the mechanical equivalent of heat. His
calculation showed that 1 kilocalorie of heat converted to work could lift 1 kilogram
366 meters. In other words, the mechanical equivalent of heat found by
Mayer was 366 kilogram-meters per kilocalorie.
This was the quantity Joule had measured, or was about to measure, in a
monumental series of experiments started in 1843. Joule’s best result (labeled as
it was later with a J ) was
J 425 kilogram-meters per kilocalorie.
Mayer’s calculation was incorrect principally because of errors in heat measurements.
More-accurate measurements by Victor Regnault in the 1850s brought
Mayer’s calculation much closer to Joule’s result,
J 426 kilogram-meters per kilocalorie.
In addition to clarifying his determination of the mechanical equivalent of
heat, Mayer’s 1845 paper also broadened his speculations concerning the conservation
of energy, or force, as Mayer’s terminology had it. Two quotations will
show how committed Mayer had become to the conservation concept: “What
chemistry performs with respect to matter, physics has to perform in the case of force. The only mission of physics is to become acquainted with force in its
various forms and to investigate the conditions governing its change. The creation
or destruction of force, if [either has] any meaning, lies outside the domain
of human thought and action.” And: “In truth there exists only a single force. In
never-ending exchange this circles through all dead as well as living nature. In
the latter as well as the former nothing happens without form variation of force!”
Mayer submitted his 1845 paper to Liebig’s Annalen; it was rejected by an
assistant editor, apparently after a cursory reading. The assistant’s advice was to
try Poggendorff’s Annalen, but Mayer did not care to follow that publication
route again. In the end, he published the paper privately, and hoped to gain
recognition by distributing it widely. But beyond a few brief journal listings, the
paper, Mayer’s magnum opus, went unnoticed.