Rumford

But it was not until J. P. Joule published a definitive paper in 1847 that the ealorie idea was abandoned. Joule eonelusively showed that heat was a form of energy. As a result of the experiments of Rumford, Joule, and others, it was demonstrated (explieitly stated by Helmholtz in 1847), that the various forms of energy ean be transformed one into another. 

Rumford decided to try a more controlled experiment. He placed a brass gun barrel in a wooden box containing about nineteen pounds of cold water, and used a team of horses to rotate a blunt steel borer inside the barrel. After 2.5 hours, the water boiled As Rumford described it, It would be difficult to describe the surprise and astonishment expressed on the countenances of the bystanders on seeing so large a quantity of cold water heated, and actually made to boil, without any fire. ... 

Rumford suggested that anything that an isolated body can supply without limitation could not possibly be a material fluid. The only thing that could be communicated in this fashion was motion, in this case the motion of the steel borer that first produced heat in the form of molecular motion of the cannon... 

Brown, S. C. (1952). Count Rumford s Concept ofllcat. American Journal of Physics 20 331-334. 

Brown, S. C. (1976). Thompson, Benjamin (Count Rumford). In Dictionary of Scientific Biography, ed. C. C. Gillispie, Vol. 13, pp. 350-352. New York Scribner. Brown, S. C. (1979). Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford. Cambridge, MA MIT Press. 

Wilson, M. (1960). Count Rumford, Scientific American 203 (Octobcr) 158-16S. 

British physicist Benjamin Thompson (Count Rumford) shows that work is convertible into heat and vice versa. 

If Comte had lived long enough to see the development of thermodynamics and its applications, he might have retracted these words. However, he died well before the work of Black, Rumford, Hess, Carnot, Joule, Clausius, Kelvin, Helmholtz, and Nernst that established different aspects of the sciences, followed by the contributions of Gibbs, Lewis, and Guggenheim that unified the science into a coherent whole.a... 

The early notion that heat was a fluid called caloric was disproved in 1798 by Benjamin Thompson (later. Count Rumford). While minister of war in Bavaria and boring cannon, he observed that heat could be produced continuously and endlessly from a given mass of iron, and so it could not be a fluid. In one of his experiments, he used a team of two horses to turn a lathe that bored a hole in a 51-kg piece of cannon iron. The iron was immersed in a wooden box containing 18.77 lb. of water. The assembly was initially at 60.°F and 1.00 atm. 

His wife, Marie-Anne, studied drawing with the great painter Jacques-Louis David in order to transcribe her husband s laboratory notes and illustrate them. David s ravishing portrait of the Lavoisiers hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The son of Marie-Anne s longtime lover founded the E. I. Du Pont de Nemours Corporation in Delaware. Marie-Anne later married the American physicist, Benjamin Thomson. Later ennobled as the Count of Rumford, Thomson demonstrated the mechanical nature of heat. Marie-Anne had an excellent eye for scientific talent. 

J. W. Gibbs (letter of acceptance of the Rumford Medal, January 10, 1881) quoted in L. P. Wheeler, Josiah Willard Gibbs, The History of a Great Mind (New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 1962), p. 88. 

A great account of this story can be found in the citation by the Royal Society of London on the occasion of the awarding of the Rumford Medal to Louis Pasteur by the President, Lord Wrottesley, on December 1, 1856 Proc. Roy. Soc. London 1857, VII, 254- 257. The text of the citation and more about Pasteur can be found at http //www.foundersofscience.net/, a website created and hosted by Dr. David V. Cohn, Professor of Biochemistry, University of Louisville. 

In 1801 Count Rumford (Benjamin Thompson) obtained for Davy a position as assistant lecturer on chemistry and director of the laboratory at the Royal Institution. In the Philosophical Magazine one finds the following description of Davy s first lecture, which was on galvanism ... 

A Letter by Sir Humphry Davy in which he introduces Mme. Lavoisier de Rumford to Dr. Ure of Glasgow. 

Credit for discovering the first law of thermodynamics is attributable to several individuals. We shall single out four key contributors for special mention Rumford, Mayer, Joule, and Helmholtz. A brief account of their contributions allows us to better appreciate the difficult concepts embodied in the first law (interconvertibility of heat and work, and conservation of their total). It also illustrates the vital mix of inspiration, experimental verification, and rigorous theoretical formulation that may be required to bring ideas from the domain of creative speculation to well-established scientific law. 

Rumford s studies (along with those of Humphrey Davy see Section 3.4) contributed to gradual decline of the caloric theory of heat and its replacement by the modem kinetic molecular theory. By about 1840, the interconversion of heat and work was clearly understood, as well as the association of heat with molecular motion. However, there was as yet no clear statement of the conservation principle for the total heat plus work. 

Rumford s fortunes eventually led him to Bavaria, where he rose to prominence as a Count... 

Rumford s approach to science was pragmatic rather than academic. He once observed that a habit of keeping the eyes open to every thing that is going on in the ordinary course of the business of life has oftener led to. .. sensible schemes for investigation and improvement than all the more intense meditations of philosophers in the hours expressly set aside for study. ... 

Although Rumford achieved considerable eminence and power, he did not inspire affection. A biographer observed that he was utterly without scruples or principles,... caustic and treacherous to his peers, and tyrannical to his subordinates. ... 

Sanborn C. Brown. Count Rumford, Physicist Extraordinary (Doubleday, Garden City, NY, 1962).]... 

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