Page:Reflections on the Motive Power of Heat.djvu/29

Rh framework of that latest of the sciences. As stated by Tait, in his history of Thermodynamics, the “two grand things” which Carnot originated and introduced were his idea of a “cycle” and the notion of its “reversibility,” when perfect. “Without this work of Carnot, the modern theory of energy, and especially that branch of it which is at present by far the most important in practice, the dynamical theory of heat, could not have attained its now enormous development.” These conceptions, original with our author, have been, in the hands of his successors, Clausius and other Continental writers, particularly, most fruitful of interesting and important results; and Clapeyron's happy thought of so employing the Watt diagram of energy as to render them easy of comprehension has proved a valuable aid in this direction.

The exact experimental data needed for numerical computations in application of Carnot's principles were inaccessible at the date of his writing; they were supplied, later, by Mayer, by Colding, by Joule, and by later investigators. Even the idea of equivalence, according to Hypolyte Carnot, was not originally familiar to the author of this remarkable work; but was gradually developed and defined as he progressed with his philosophy. It is sufficiently distinctly enunciated in his later