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CARNOT, Nicolas Lonard Sadi (1796-1832). Rflexions sur la puissance motrice du feu et sur les machines propres dvelopper cette puissance. Paris: Bachelier, 1824.
8o (217 x 137 mm). Half-title, folding engraved plate. (Final blank removed, small repaired tear at gutter of half-title and title leaves, some dampstaining, minor foxing.) Later plain blue wrappers (slightly dampstained); morocco-backed folding case.
FIRST EDITION, THE FOUNDATION WORK OF THERMODYNAMICS. Carnot's promising scientific career was cut short by his early death of scarlet fever, and the Rflexions remained his only published work. Underappreciated by contemporaries, who praised the work for its practical results but ignored the originality of Carnot's reasoning, his treatise was "rediscovered" in the 1840s and heavily influenced those scientists who enunciated the mathematics of the laws of thermodynamics. Carnot's Reflections were prompted by the need to further improve the new two-cylinder compound steam engine developed by Arthur Woolf in the first years of the century. Other scientists who had addressed this problem had focussed on the properties of steam; Carnot's genius was to elaborate a general theory of heat as a motive force. His achievements were momentous in spite of his use of the prevailing concept of heat as the manifestation of an ineffable fluid called "caloric" (although his surviving unpublished papers revealed that he harbored serious reservations about the validity of the caloric theory). In the course of his argument he "resolved two crucial problems: he showed, without mathematics, that motive force is obtained when heat passes from a hot source to a cold source, and that this motive force is independent of the machine that is utilized; it depends only on the temperatures of the hot and cold sources" (En franais dans le texte). This theorem, which implies that motive power can be produced whenever there is a temperature difference, and that once an equilibrium of temperature is reached work ceases, was the first statement of the second law of thermodynamics. The proof for the law was completed by Rudolf Clausius and William Thomson working separately in 1849-1850. In introducing "the fundamental thermodynamic concept of completeness of cycle, in which the engine and working substance return to their original conditions" (Norman), Carnot paved the way for Helmholtz's, Joule's and Mayer's formulations of the theory of the conservation of energy and the equivalence of heat and work, the basic principles of the first law of thermodynamics, which Carnot had himself formulated, in manuscript notebooks published by his brother in 1878. Carnot's work was also used by William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) in establishing an absolute scale of temperature. Dibner Heralds of Science 155; En franais dans le texte 239; PMM 285; Norman 404.
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FIRST EDITION, THE FOUNDATION WORK OF THERMODYNAMICS. Carnot's promising scientific career was cut short by his early death of scarlet fever, and the Rflexions remained his only published work. Underappreciated by contemporaries, who praised the work for its practical results but ignored the originality of Carnot's reasoning, his treatise was "rediscovered" in the 1840s and heavily influenced those scientists who enunciated the mathematics of the laws of thermodynamics. Carnot's Reflections were prompted by the need to further improve the new two-cylinder compound steam engine developed by Arthur Woolf in the first years of the century. Other scientists who had addressed this problem had focussed on the properties of steam; Carnot's genius was to elaborate a general theory of heat as a motive force. His achievements were momentous in spite of his use of the prevailing concept of heat as the manifestation of an ineffable fluid called "caloric" (although his surviving unpublished papers revealed that he harbored serious reservations about the validity of the caloric theory). In the course of his argument he "resolved two crucial problems: he showed, without mathematics, that motive force is obtained when heat passes from a hot source to a cold source, and that this motive force is independent of the machine that is utilized; it depends only on the temperatures of the hot and cold sources" (En franais dans le texte). This theorem, which implies that motive power can be produced whenever there is a temperature difference, and that once an equilibrium of temperature is reached work ceases, was the first statement of the second law of thermodynamics. The proof for the law was completed by Rudolf Clausius and William Thomson working separately in 1849-1850. In introducing "the fundamental thermodynamic concept of completeness of cycle, in which the engine and working substance return to their original conditions" (Norman), Carnot paved the way for Helmholtz's, Joule's and Mayer's formulations of the theory of the conservation of energy and the equivalence of heat and work, the basic principles of the first law of thermodynamics, which Carnot had himself formulated, in manuscript notebooks published by his brother in 1878. Carnot's work was also used by William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) in establishing an absolute scale of temperature. Dibner Heralds of Science 155; En franais dans le texte 239; PMM 285; Norman 404.