Who do you suppose is credited with first enunciating the First Law?
By whom? Hermann von Helmholtz would be the answer on a Trivial
Pursuit card or on Jeopardy, but it is clear that the first law
has evolved since his time, and that later formulations of the
law are more correct (or more complete) than Helmholtz's. After
all, the first law was a pretty feeble approximation before the
discovery by Einstein of the principal energy term in the law.
Up to that time the first law was far from being universal
since it didn't include the most prodigious energy transforming
processes in the universe.