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The steam-engine having furnished us with a means of converting heat into a motive power, and our thoughts being thereby led to regard a certain quan… - Rudolf Clausius
" "The steam-engine having furnished us with a means of converting heat into a motive power, and our thoughts being thereby led to regard a certain quantity of work as an equivalent for the amount of heat expended in its production, the idea of establishing theoretically some fixed relation between a quantity of heat and the quantity of work which it can possibly produce, from which relation conclusions regarding the nature of heat itself might be deduced, naturally presents itself. Already, indeed, have many successful efforts been made with this view; I believe, however, that they have not exhausted the subject, but that, on the contrary, it merits the continued attention of physicists... The most important investigation in connexion with this subject is that of S. Carnot.
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About Rudolf Clausius
Rudolf Julius Emanuel Clausius (2 January 1822 –24 August 1888) was a German physicist and mathematician. He is considered one of the founders of the science of thermodynamics. By his restatement of Sadi Carnot's principle known as the Carnot cycle, he provided a more fundamental foundation for the theory of heat. His most important paper, On the Moving Force of Heat (1850) was first to declare the second law of thermodynamics. He introduced the concept of entropy in 1865, and the virial theorem for heat in 1870.
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Native Name:
Rudolf Julius Emanuel Clausius
Alternative Names:
Rudolf Gottlieb
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Additional quotes by Rudolf Clausius
The careful experiments of Joule, who developed heat in various ways by the application of mechanical force, establish almost to a certainty, not only the possibility of increasing the quantity of heat, but also the fact that the newly-produced heat is proportional to the work expended in its production.
Many facts have lately transpired which tend to overthrow the hypothesis that heat is itself a body, and to prove that it consists in a motion of the ultimate particles of bodies. If this be so, the general principles of mechanics may be applied to heat; this motion may be converted into work, the loss of in each particular case being proportional to the quantity of work produced.
These circumstances, of which Carnot was also well aware, and the importance of which he expressly admitted, pressingly demand a comparison between heat and work, to be undertaken with reference to the divergent assumption that the production of work is not only due to an alteration in the distribution of heat, but to an actual consumption thereof; and inversely, that by the expenditure of work, heat may be produced.
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My memoirs "On the Mechanical Theory of Heat" are of different kinds. Some are devoted to the development of the general theory and to the application thereof to those properties of bodies which are usually treated of in the doctrine of heat. Others have reference to the application of the mechanical theory of heat to electricity. ...Other memoirs... have reference to the conceptions I have formed of the molecular motions which we call heat. These conceptions, however, have no necessary connexion with the general theory, the latter being based solely on certain principles which may be accepted without adopting any particular view as to the nature of molecular motions. I have therefore kept the consideration of molecular motions quite distinct from the exposition of the general theory.
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