Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot
Reception

Carnot published his book in June 1824, and it was presented at that time to the French Academy of Sciences by Pierre-Simon Girard. Girard also published a praiseful but rather broad review of the book in the Revue encyclopédique, but after that the book seems to have fallen into obscurity. It was only after the publication of an extensive commentary and explication of Carnot's work by Émile Clapeyron in 1834 that engineers and scientists began to take an interest in Carnot's contributions. Clapeyron's article was translated into English in 1837 and into German in 1843.

Kelvin read Clapeyron's paper in 1845, while visiting the Paris laboratory of Henri Regnault, but it was only at the end of 1848 that Kelvin was able to read Carnot's original work, in a copy provided to him by Lewis Gordon. Independently of Kelvin, the German physicist Rudolf Clausius also based his study of thermodynamics on Carnot's work. Clausius modified Carnot's arguments to make them compatible with the mechanical equivalence of heat. This then led Clausius to define the concept of entropy and to formulate the second law of thermodynamics.

Carnot's text was re-printed in 1871 in the Annales Scientifiques of the École normale supérieure, and again by Gauthier-Villars in 1878 with the collaboration of Hippolyte Carnot. In 1890 an English translation of the book was published by R. H. Thurston. That version has been reprinted in recent decades by Dover. In 1892, Lord Kelvin referred to Carnot's essay as "an epoch-making gift to science."

Carnot published his book in the heyday of steam engines. His theory explained the advantage of engines that use superheated steam, since they absorb heat from a reservoir at a higher temperature. Carnot's work did not, however, lead to any immediate practical improvements of steam technologies. It was only towards the end of the nineteenth century that engineers deliberately implemented Carnot's key concepts: that the efficiency of a heat is improved by increasing the temperature at which heat is drawn and by minimizing the flow of heat between bodies at different temperatures. In particular, Rudolf Diesel used Carnot's analysis in his design of the diesel engine, in which heat is injected at a much higher temperature than in the older steam engines, and in which the heat from the combustion of the fuel goes primarily into expanding the air in the cylinder (rather than into increasing its temperature).
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