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On Heat.



I came across this excerpt today, which you may enjoy:

"Being engaged, lately, in superintending the boring of cannon, in the
workshops of the military arsenal at Munich, I was struck with the very
considerable degree of Heat which a brass gun acquires in a short time, in
being bored; and with the still more intense Heat (much greater than that
of boiling water, as I found by experiment) of the metallic chips separated
from it by the borer.

The more I meditated upon these phenomena, the more they appeared to me to
bid fair to give a farther insight into the hidden nature of Heat; and to
enable us to form some reasonable conjectures respecting the existance, or
non-existance, of an igneous fluid; a subject on which the opinions of
philosophers have, in all ages, been much divided."

Benjamin Thompson, Lord Rumford.
Minister of War, Bavaria.
[from Heat Engines. J.F. Sandfort. Heinemann.]


Brian Whatcott
Altus OK Eureka!