Top 15 Nicolas Carnot Quotes

[W]hen a body has experienced any changes, and when after a certain number of transformations it returns to precisely its original state, that is, to that state considered in respect to density, to temperature, to mode of aggregation—let us suppose, I say, that this body is found to contain the same quantity of heat that it contained at first, or else that the quantities of heat absorbed or set free in these different transformations are exactly compensated. This fact has never been called in question. It was first admitted without reflection, and verified afterwards in many cases by experiments with the . To deny it would be to overthrow the whole theory of heat to which it serves as a basis. For the rest, we may say in passing, the main principles on which the theory of heat rests require the most careful examination. Many experimental facts appear almost inexplicable in the present state of this theory.

The maximum of motive power resulting from the employment of steam is also the maximum of motive power realizable by any means whatever.

Heat can evidently be a cause of motion only by virtue of the changes of volume or of form which it produces in bodies.

Wherever there exists a difference of temperature... it is possible to have also the production of impelling power. ...All substances in nature can be employed for this purpose, all are susceptible of changes of volume, of successive contractions and dilatations, through the alternation of heat and cold. All are capable of overcoming in their changes of volume certain resistances... A solid... A liquid... An aeriform fluid... If it is enclosed in an expansible space, such as a cylinder provided with a piston, it will produce movements of great extent. Vapors of all substances capable of passing into a gaseous condition, as of , of mercury, of , etc., may fulfil the same office as vapor of water. ...Most of these... have been proposed, many even have been tried, although... without remarkable success.

[I]f we should find about us only bodies as hot as our furnaces, how can we condense steam? What should we do with it if once produced?

[T]he production of heat alone is not sufficient to give birth to the impelling power: it is necessary that there should also be cold; without it, the heat would be useless.

The production of motive power is then due... not to an actual consumption of caloric, but to its transportation from a warm body to a cold body... to its re-establishment of equilibrium...

[W]e have just described the re-establishment of equilibrium in the caloric, its passage from a... heated body to a cooler one.

What happens... in a steam-engine... ? The caloric developed in the furnace by the effect of the combustion traverses the walls of the boiler, produces steam, and in some way incorporates itself with it. The latter carrying it away, takes it first into the cylinder, where it performs some function, and from thence into the condenser, where it is liquefied by contact with the cold water... [T]he cold water of the condenser takes possession of the caloric... It is heated by the intervention of the steam as if it had been placed directly over the furnace. The steam is here only a means of transporting the caloric.

The production of motion in steam-engines is always accompanied by... the re-establishing of equilibrium in the caloric; that is, its passage from a body in which the temperature is more or less elevated, to another in which it is lower.

We shall have [a complete theory] only when the laws of Physics shall be extended enough, generalized enough, to make known beforehand all the effects of heat acting in a determined manner on any body.

The phenomenon of the production of motion by heat has not been considered from a sufficiently general point of view. We have considered it only in machines... [for which] the phenomenon is... incomplete. It becomes difficult to recognize its principles and study its laws. ...[T]he principle of the production of motion by heat... must be considered independently of any mechanism or... particular agent. It is necessary to establish principles applicable not only to steam-engines but to all imaginable heat-engines, whatever the working substance and whatever the method by which it is operated.

Notwithstanding the work of all kinds done by steam-engines... their theory is very little understood, and the attempts to improve them are still directed almost by chance.

Savery, Newcomen, Smeaton, the famous Watt, Woolf, Trevithick, and some other English engineers, are the veritable creators of the steam-engine.

There is almost as great a distance between the first apparatus in which the expansive force of steam was displayed and the existing machine, as between the first raft that man ever made and the modern vessel.