[Phys-L] Re: Caloric

[Brian Whatcott <betwys1@SBCGLOBAL.NET>]

At 10:41 AM 6/4/2005, you wrote:
> ...
> 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, André-Marie Ampere, François Arago,
Alexis-Thérèse 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.

As is often the way, this caloric theory which embodied the ethereal
  principle associated with rapid exothermal reactions was brought
into question by (amongst other tests) the pre- post- mass testing
  of combustors so that a fluid departing rather than joining a
  conflagration was thence sought.

Forty years later or so, a more comprehensive theory was adopted called
Conservation of Energy,    but this was  revised to a Theory
  of Conservation of Energy-Mass after ninety years or so,
which is the current state of affairs.
I have not identified  here the earliest proponent of the Caloric theory
  however.



Brian Whatcott    Altus OK    Eureka!
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