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At 10:41 AM 6/4/2005, you wrote:cut
...
Who invented the idea of caloric?
What was the motivation?
TX
Jim Green
mailto:JMGreen@sisna.com
http://users.sisna.com/jmgreen
Jean-Baptiste Biot, AndrÃ-Marie Ampere, FranÃois Arago,
Alexis-ThÃrÃse Petit, Augustin Fresnel, Pierre-Louis Dulong,
Etienne-Louis Malus, Louis-Joseph Gay-Lussac
preceded Sadi Carnot through the Ecole Polytechnique in its
first ten or fifteen years, an institution founded in the
Revolution. These were physicists and a chemist of the first water.
The Caloric theory was then in vogue at the Poly, where it
formed an early conservation theory for one form of energy,
which might be called Conservation of Heat-Energy.
It was Carnot's discomfiture that the British were making leading strides
in heat engine efficiency, at the hands of practical rather than
theoretically advanced engineer-physicists that played a part in his
elegant formulation of the limits of heat engine efficiency.
This school soon gained the [present] cachet of Harvard and West Point
with the leading edge technical teaching of MIT, in the usual way - by
attracting the most capable students, and the most reputable establishment
teachers and appointing the products to the most prestigious positions.