Timeline of thermodynamics

A timeline of events in the history of thermodynamics. 1650 – Otto von Guericke builds the first vacuum pump 1660 – Robert Boyle experimentally discovers Boyle's Law, relating the pressure and volume of a gas (published 1662) 1665 – Robert Hooke published his book Micrographia, which contained the statement: "Heat being nothing else but a very brisk and vehement agitation of the parts of a body." 1667 – J. J. Becher puts forward a theory of combustion involving combustible earth in his book Physica subterranea (see Phlogiston theory). 1676–1689 – Gottfried Leibniz develops the concept of vis viva, a limited version of the conservation of energy 1679 – Denis Papin designed a steam digester which inspired the development of the piston-and-cylinder steam engine. 1694–1734 – Georg Ernst Stahl names Becher's combustible earth as phlogiston and develops the theory 1698 – Thomas Savery patents an early steam engine 1702 – Guillaume Amontons introduces the concept of absolute zero, based on observations of gases 1738 – Daniel Bernoulli publishes Hydrodynamica, initiating the kinetic theory 1749 – Émilie du Châtelet, in her French translation and commentary on Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, derives the conservation of energy from the first principles of Newtonian mechanics. 1761 – Joseph Black discovers that ice absorbs heat without changing its temperature when melting 1772 – Black's student Daniel Rutherford discovers nitrogen, which he calls phlogisticated air, and together they explain the results in terms of the phlogiston theory 1776 – John Smeaton publishes a paper on experiments related to power, work, momentum, and kinetic energy, supporting the conservation of energy 1777 – Carl Wilhelm Scheele distinguishes heat transfer by thermal radiation from that by convection and conduction 1783 – Antoine Lavoisier discovers oxygen and develops an explanation for combustion; in his paper "Réflexions sur le phlogistique", he deprecates the phlogiston theory and proposes a caloric theory 1784 – Jan Ingenhousz describes Brownian motion of charcoal particles on water 1791 – Pierre Prévost shows that all bodies radiate heat, no matter how hot or cold they are 1798 – Count Rumford (Benjamin Thompson) publishes his paper An Experimental Enquiry Concerning the Source of the Heat which is Excited by Friction detailing measurements of the frictional heat generated in boring cannons and develops the idea that heat is a form of kinetic energy; his measurements are inconsistent with caloric theory, but are also sufficiently imprecise as to leave room for doubt.

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