Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/414

 his point by a weight resting upon the earth, suspended at a height-above the earth, and actually falling to the earth. He next fixes his attention on cases where motion is apparently destroyed, without producing other motion; on the shock of inelastic bodies, for example. Under what form does the vanished motion maintain itself? "Experiment alone," says Mayer, "can help us here." He warms water by stirring it; he refers to the force expended in overcoming friction. Motion in both cases disappears; but heat is generated, and the quantity generated is the equivalent of the motion destroyed. "Our locomotives," he observes with extraordinary sagacity, "may be compared to distilling apparatus: the heat beneath the boiler passes into the motion of the train, and is again deposited as heat in the axles and wheels."

A numerical solution of the relation between heat and work was what Mayer aimed at, and toward the end of his first paper he makes the attempt. It was known that a definite amount of air, in rising one degree in temperature, can take up two different amounts of heat. If its volume be kept constant, it takes up one amount; if its pressure be kept constant, it takes up a different amount. These two amounts are called the specific heat under constant volume and under constant pressure. The ratio of the first to the second is as 1: 1·421. No man, to my knowledge, prior to Dr. Mayer, penetrated the significance of these two numbers. He first saw that the excess 0·421 was not, as then universally supposed, heat actually lodged in the gas, but heat which had been actually consumed by the gas in expanding against pressure. The amount of work here performed was accurately known, the amount of heat consumed was also accurately known, and from these data Mayer determined the mechanical equivalent of heat. Even in this first paper he is able to direct attention to the enormous discrepancy between the theoretic power of the fuel consumed in steam-engines and their useful effect.

Though this paper contains but the germ of his further labors, I think it may be safely assumed that, as regards the mechanical theory of heat, this obscure Heilbronn physician, in the year 1842, was in advance of all the scientific men of the time.

Having, by the publication of this paper, secured himself against what he calls "Eventualitäten," he devoted every hour of his spare time to his studies, and in 1845 published a memoir which far transcends his first one in weight and fullness, and indeed marks an epoch in the history of science. The title of Mayer's first paper was, "Remarks on the Forces of Inorganic Nature." The title of his second great essay was, "Organic Motion in its Connection with Nutrition." In it he expands and illustrates the physical principles laid down in his first brief paper. He goes fully through the calculation of the mechanical equivalent of heat. He calculates the performances of steam-engines, and finds that 100 pounds of coal, in a good working engine, produce only the same amount of heat as 95 pounds in an unworking one; the 5 missing pounds having been converted into work. He determines the useful effect of gunpowder, and finds nine per cent, of the force of the consumed charcoal invested on the moving ball. He records observations on the heat generated in water agitated by the pulping engine of a paper manufactory, and calculates the equivalent of that heat in horse-power. He compares chemical combination with mechanical combination—the union of atoms with the union of falling bodies with the earth. He calculates the velocity with which a body starting at an infinite distance would