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Joule has also proved that, when iron is released from its amalgam by distilling away the mercury, the metallic iron takes fire on exposure to air, and is therefore clearly different from ordinary iron. A New Catalogue of Valuable Papers Contained in SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN SUPPLEMENT during the past ten years, sent free of charge to any address. MUNN & CO., 361 Broadway, New York.
Siemens had been trained as a mechanical engineer, and, although he became an eminent electrician in later life, his most important work at this early stage was non-electrical; indeed, the greatest achievement of his life was non-electrical, for we must regard the regenerative furnace as his MAGNUM OPUS. Though in 1847 he published a paper in Liebig's ANNALEN DER CHEMIE on the 'Mercaptan of Selenium, his mind was busy with the new ideas upon the nature of heat which were promulgated by Carnot, Clayperon, Joule, Clausius, Mayer, Thomson, and Rankine.
Your development of thermo-dynamics, coupled with the great discovery of Joule of the numerical relation of heat and dynamic effect, or the quantity of the one that is equal to a quantity of the other, places within our reach the numerical result to be obtained from assumed elements of heat prime movers.
The year of my visit the medal was awarded to Mr. Joule, the English physicist, for his work on the relation of heat and energy. I was a guest at the banquet, which was the most brilliant function I had witnessed up to that time. The leaders in English science and learning sat around the table. Her Majesty's government was represented by Mr. Gladstone, the Premier, and Mr.
Huxley, Tyndall, Darwin, Sir Joseph Hooker, Joule, Lyell, Murchison were in the midst of their best work, and probably all or most of them were present at the meeting of the British Association, which took place that year somewhere in the west of England.
The man whose name is thus remembered will perhaps be spoken of as the Galileo, the Newton, of the nineteenth century; but whether the name thus dignified by the final verdict of history will be that of Colding, Mohr, Mayer, Helmholtz, or Joule, is not as, yet decided.
What has been regarded by many as the greatest scientific triumph of modern times was worked out about the middle of the last century by James Prescott Joule and others, in determining that a certain amount of mechanical energy is exactly equivalent to a definite amount of heat.
Forbes was under thirty when he discovered the polarization of heat, which pointed the way to Mohr, then thirty-one, to the mechanical equivalent. Joule was twenty-two in 1840, when his great work was begun; and Mayer, whose discoveries date from the same year, was then twenty-six, which was also the age of Helmholtz when he published his independent discovery of the same law.
Joule found, for example, that at the sea-level in Manchester a pound weight falling through seven hundred and seventy-two feet could generate enough heat to raise the temperature of a pound of water one degree Fahrenheit. There was nothing haphazard, nothing accidental, about this; it bore the stamp of unalterable law.
The acceptance of this view led to the highly important inquiry, What is the equivalent relation between mechanical force and heat? or, how much heat is produced by a definite quantity of mechanical force? To Dr. Joule, of Manchester, England, is due the honor of having answered this question, and experimentally established the numerical relation.
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