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"... The generalization of the metamorphosis of forces, which was begun a century ago by Count Rumford when he recognized heat as a mode of molecular motion, was consummated about the middle of the century, when Doctor Joule showed mathematically just how much heat is equivalent to just how much visible motion, and when the researches of Helmholtz, Mayer, and Faraday completed the grand demonstration that light and heat and magnetism and electricity and visible motion are all interchangeable one into the other, and are continually thus interchanging from moment to moment."
Boyle, Cavendish, Priestley, Lavoisier, Black, Dalton and others had laid a broad foundation, and Young, Frauenhofer, Rumford, Davy, Joule, Faraday, Clerk-Maxwell, Helmholtz and others built upon that and gave us the new physics and made possible our age of electricity.
It still expects to get a Newton or a Joule for £800 a year, and requires him to conduct his researches in the margin of time left over when he has got through his annual eighty or ninety lectures. It imagines discoveries are a sort of inspiration that comes when professors are running to catch trains. It seems incapable of imagining how enormous are the untried possibilities of research.
But, for that matter, the experiments that had established the mechanical equivalent of heat hardly left room for doubt as to the immateriality of this "imponderable." Out of these studies, just at the middle of the century, to which the experiments of Mayer and Joule had led, grew the new science of thermo-dynamics.
It is but within the last fifty years that the laws of the relation between the different physical forces were first enunciated by Justice Grove, and confirmed by the classical researches of Dr. Joule the one a lawyer, working hard at his profession, the other a man of business engaged in manufacture.
William Thomson was a youth just past his majority when he came to the aid of Joule before the British Society, and but seven years older when he formulated his own doctrine of the dissipation of energy. And Clausius and Rankine, who are usually mentioned with Thomson as the great developers of thermo-dynamics, were both far advanced with their novel studies before they were thirty.
This, perhaps the greatest of all scientific discoveries since the time of Newton, was first, I believe, enunciated in 1842 by Grove, in a lecture given at the London Institution; and it was experimentally proved by the researches of Joule, described in a paper which he read at the meeting of the British Association which was held at Cork my native city in 1843. My friend Dr.
His home was in Manchester, England; his occupation that of a manufacturer. He was a friend and pupil of the great Dr. Dalton. His name was James Prescott Joule. When posterity has done its final juggling with the names of the nineteenth century, it is not unlikely that the name of this Manchester philosopher will be a household word, like the names of Aristotle, Copernicus, and Newton.
And this magnificent law, like that of the conservation of matter, is strong evidence that there must have been a real Creation at some time in the long ago, different not merely in degree but in kind from anything known to modern science. Joule worked out the mechanical equivalent of heat by means of his now famous experiment of churning water.
But while this citation is fresh in mind, we must turn our attention with all haste to a country across the Channel to Denmark, in short and learn that even as Joule experimented with the transformation of heat, a philosopher of Copenhagen, Colding by name, had hit upon the same idea, and carried it far towards a demonstration.
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