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This accolade is more usually awarded to the Scottish inventor James Watt. In 1763 Watt was asked to repair a Newcomen engine by the University of Glasgow, and in doing so he developed a new steam engine which, it is appropriate to say without hyperbole, transformed the landscape of modern life. Watt’s steam engine was more efficient and more flexible than its predecessor; it used far less coal than the Newcomen for a given power output, and was therefore much cheaper to run. More importantly still, Watt’s engine could do more than pump water out of the wet mines, it could also generate the rotary motion that was needed to power the machines on the factory floor. No longer did a factory have to be situated by a river to turn its equipment; with the help of Watt’s engine a factory could be sited anywhere, catalysing the emergence of the modern industrial landscape. Steam-powered machines changed the course of history, and yet despite their importance, the nineteenth-century engineers who followed Watt struggled to improve them. There seemed to be fundamental principles that restricted their efficiency, but with profit margins to maximise, even a small increase in their effectiveness would be highly valuable. So understanding how hot the fire should be or what substance should be boiled in the engine were problems that were not only interesting from a scientific perspective but were also critical for businesses. It was out of these questions of engineering design that the science of thermodynamics arose, and with it the concepts of heat, temperature and energy entered the scientific vocabulary in a precise way for the first time.

In a series of simple experiments, Joule demonstrated that mechanical work could be converted into heat. Using a paddle wheel turned by falling weights, he stirred water in an insulated barrel and observed how the temperature of the water rose by the amount that depended on how far the weights fell.

One of the scientists working on these problems was the German mathematician Rudolf Clausius. Clausius was interested in heat, which until the first half of the nineteenth century was thought to be a fluid that flowed from hot things to cold things. Clausius and others realised that this description was not able to explain the cycle of a steam engine. The foundation for Clausius’s theoretical advances was laid by one of his contemporaries, the English physicist and brewer James Joule, who was working to improve the efficiency of the steam engines in his brewery. What finer motivation for the advance of fundamental physics? The quest for cheaper beer motivated him to investigate the relationship between the work his steam engines could do, and heat. In doing so he managed to reduce the costs of beer production and lay one of the cornerstones of the science of thermodynamics.

Using a series of beautifully simple experiments, Joule was able to demonstrate that mechanical work could be converted into heat. One such experiment used a falling weight to spin a paddle within an insulated barrel of water. Joule knew how much work was done by the falling weight and so could measure the temperature rise of the water. He conducted similar experiments on compressed gases and flowing water, and each time he found that it took the same amount of work to raise the temperature of a fixed amount of water by one degree Fahrenheit. Inscribed on his tombstone in Brooklands cemetery near Manchester is the number 772.55 – his measurement of the amount of work done in foot-pounds force that is required to raise the temperature of one pound of water by one degree Fahrenheit.

The reason that Joule’s work was important is that it demonstrated that heat is not a thing that can be created or destroyed. It doesn’t literally flow between things or move around, it is in fact a measure of something else. Even today, this is perhaps not obvious because we still speak of the flow of heat from hot to cold things. Heat, we now understand, is simply a form of energy. Just as a ball resting on a table has energy which can be released