Page:Reflections on the Motive Power of Heat.djvu/27

Rh loss of heat in a completed cycle and in thus ignoring the permanent transformation of a definite proportion into mechanical energy; but his proposition that efficiency increases with increase of temperature-range is still correct; as is his assertion of its independence of the nature of the working substance.

Carnot's “Réflexions sur la Puissance Motrice du Feu,” published in 1824, escaped notice at the time, was only now and then slightly referred to later, until Clapeyron seized upon its salient ideas and illustrated them by the use of the Watt diagram of energy, and might, perhaps, have still remained unknown to the world except for the fact that Sir William Thomson, that greatest of modern mathematical physicists, fortunately, when still a youth and at the commencement of his own great work, discovered it, revealed its extraordinary merit, and, readjusting Carnot's principles in accordance with the modern views of heat-energy, gave it the place that it is so well entitled to in the list of the era-making books of the age. But it still remained inaccessible to all who could not find the original paper until, only a few years since, it was reprinted by Gauthier-Villars, the great publishing house of Paris, accompanied by a biographical sketch by the younger brother, which