Reflections
The story of thermodynamics begins in 1824 in Paris. France had been rocked to
its foundations by thirty-five years of war, revolution, and dictatorship. A king
had been executed, constitutions had been written, Napoleon had come and gone
twice, and the monarchy had been restored twice. Napoleon had successfully
marched his armies through the countries of Europe and then disastrously into
Russia. France had been invaded and occupied and had paid a large war
indemnity.
In 1824, a technical memoir was published by a young military engineer who
had been born into this world of social, military, and political turmoil. The engineer’s
name was Sadi Carnot, and his bookhad the title Reflections on the
Motive Power of Fire. By “motive power” he meant work, or the rate of doing
work, and “fire” was his term for heat. His goal was to solve a problem that had
hardly even been imagined by his predecessors. He hoped to discover the general
operating principles of steam engines and other heat engine devices that supply
workoutput from heat input. He did not quite realize his purpose, and his work
was largely ignored at the time it was published, but after Carnot’s workwas
rediscovered more than twenty years later it became the main inspiration for
subsequent workin thermodynamics.
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