Page:Reflections on the Motive Power of Heat.djvu/68

46 least partially, for on the one hand the heated air, after having performed its function, having passed round the boiler, goes out through the chimney with a temperature much below that which it had acquired as the effect of combustion; and on the other hand, the water of the condenser, after having liquefied the steam, leaves the machine with a temperature higher than that with which it entered.

The production of motive power is then due in steam-engines not to an actual consumption of caloric, but to its transportation from a warm body to a cold body, that is, to its re-establishment of equilibrium—an equilibrium considered as destroyed by any cause whatever, by chemical action such as combustion, or by any other. We shall see shortly that this principle is applicable to any machine set in motion by heat.

According to this principle, the production of heat alone is not sufficient to give birth to the impelling power: it is necessary that there should also be cold; without it, the heat would be useless. And in fact, if we should find about us only bodies as hot as our furnaces, how can we condense steam? What should we do with it if once produced? We should not presume that we might discharge it into the atmosphere, as is done