3/11/2019 Timeline of thermodynamics - Wikipedia

Timeline of thermodynamics
A timeline of events related to thermodynamics.

Contents
Before 1800
1800–1847
1848–1899
1900–1944
1945–present
See also
References

Before 1800
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 stated: "Heat being nothing else but a very brisk and vehement agitation of the parts of a
body."[1]
1669 – J. J. Becher puts forward a theory of combustion involving combustible earth (Latin terra pinguis).
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) performs 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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1800–1847
1802 – Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac publishes Charles's law, discovered (but unpublished) by Jacques Charles around
1787; this shows the dependency between temperature and volume. Gay-Lussac also formulates the law relating
temperature with pressure (the pressure law, or Gay-Lussac's law)
1804 – Sir John Leslie observes that a matte black surface radiates heat more effectively than a polished surface,
suggesting the importance of black-body radiation
1805 – William Hyde Wollaston defends the conservation of energy in On the Force of Percussion
1808 – John Dalton defends caloric theory in A New System of Chemistry and describes how it combines with matter,
especially gases; he proposes that the heat capacity of gases varies inversely with atomic weight
1810 – Sir John Leslie freezes water to ice artificially
1813 – Peter Ewart supports the idea of the conservation of energy in his paper On the measure of moving force; the
paper strongly influences Dalton and his pupil, James Joule
1819 – Pierre Louis Dulong and Alexis Thérèse Petit give the Dulong-Petit law for the specific heat capacity of a
crystal
1820 – John Herapath develops some ideas in the kinetic theory of gases but mistakenly associates temperature with
molecular momentum rather than kinetic energy; his work receives little attention other than from Joule
1822 – Joseph Fourier formally introduces the use of dimensions for physical quantities in his Théorie Analytique de
la Chaleur
1822 – Marc Seguin writes to John Herschel supporting the conservation of energy and kinetic theory
1824 – Sadi Carnot analyzes the efficiency of steam engines using caloric theory; he develops the notion of a
reversible process and, in postulating that no such thing exists in nature, lays the foundation for the second law of
thermodynamics, and initiating the science of thermodynamics
1827 – Robert Brown discovers the Brownian motion of pollen and dye particles in water
1831 – Macedonio Melloni demonstrates that black-body radiation can be reflected, refracted, and polarised in the
same way as light
1834 – Émile Clapeyron popularises Carnot's work through a graphical and analytic formulation. He also combined
Boyle's Law, Charles's Law, and Gay-Lussac's Law to produce a Combined Gas Law. PV/T = k
1841 – Julius Robert von Mayer, an amateur scientist, writes a paper on the conservation of energy, but his lack of
academic training leads to its rejection
1842 – Mayer makes a connection between work, heat, and the human metabolism based on his observations of
blood made while a ship's surgeon; he calculates the mechanical equivalent of heat
1842 – William Robert Grove demonstrates the thermal dissociation of molecules into their constituent atoms, by
showing that steam can be disassociated into oxygen and hydrogen, and the process reversed
1843 – John James Waterston fully expounds the kinetic theory of gases, but is ridiculed and ignored
1843 – James Joule experimentally finds the mechanical equivalent of heat
1845 – Henri Victor Regnault added Avogadro's Law to the Combined Gas Law to produce the Ideal Gas Law. PV =
nRT
1846 – Karl-Hermann Knoblauch publishes De calore radiante disquisitiones experimentis quibusdam novis illustratae
1846 – Grove publishes an account of the general theory of the conservation of energy in On The Correlation of
Physical Forces
1847 – Hermann von Helmholtz publishes a definitive statement of the conservation of energy, the first law of
thermodynamics

1848–1899
1848 – William Thomson extends the concept of absolute zero from gases to all substances
1849 – William John Macquorn Rankine calculates the correct relationship between saturated vapour pressure and
temperature using his hypothesis of molecular vortices
1850 – Rankine uses his vortex theory to establish accurate relationships between the temperature, pressure, and
density of gases, and expressions for the latent heat of evaporation of a liquid; he accurately predicts the surprising
fact that the apparent specific heat of saturated steam will be negative
1850 – Rudolf Clausius gives the first clear joint statement of the first and second law of thermodynamics, abandoning
the caloric theory, but preserving Carnot's principle
1851 – Thomson gives an alternative statement of the second law

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1852 – Joule and Thomson demonstrate that a rapidly expanding gas cools, later named the Joule–Thomson effect or
Joule–Kelvin effect
1854 – Helmholtz puts forward the idea of the heat death of the universe
1854 – Clausius establishes the importance of dQ/T (Clausius's theorem), but does not yet name the quantity
1854 – Rankine introduces his thermodynamic function, later identified as entropy
1856 – August Krönig publishes an account of the kinetic theory of gases, probably after reading Waterston's work
1857 – Clausius gives a modern and compelling account of the kinetic theory of gases in his On the nature of motion
called heat
1859 – James Clerk Maxwell discovers the distribution law of molecular velocities
1859 – Gustav Kirchhoff shows that energy emission from a black body is a function of only temperature and
frequency
1862 – "Disgregation", a precursor of entropy, was defined in 1862 by Clausius as the magnitude of the degree of
separation of molecules of a body
1865 – Clausius introduces the modern macroscopic concept of entropy
1865 – Josef Loschmidt applies Maxwell's theory to estimate the number-density of molecules in gases, given
observed gas viscosities.
1867 – Maxwell asks whether Maxwell's demon could reverse irreversible processes
1870 – Clausius proves the scalar virial theorem
1872 – Ludwig Boltzmann states the Boltzmann equation for the temporal development of distribution functions in
phase space, and publishes his H-theorem
1873 - Johannes Diderik van der Waals formulates his equation of state
1874 – Thomson formally states the second law of thermodynamics
1876 – Josiah Willard Gibbs publishes the first of two papers (the second appears in 1878) which discuss phase
equilibria, statistical ensembles, the free energy as the driving force behind chemical reactions, and chemical
thermodynamics in general.
1876 – Loschmidt criticises Boltzmann's H theorem as being incompatible with microscopic reversibility (Loschmidt's
paradox).
1877 – Boltzmann states the relationship between entropy and probability
1879 – Jožef Stefan observes that the total radiant flux from a blackbody is proportional to the fourth power of its
temperature and states the Stefan–Boltzmann law
1884 – Boltzmann derives the Stefan–Boltzmann blackbody radiant flux law from thermodynamic considerations
1888 – Henri-Louis Le Chatelier states his principle that the response of a chemical system perturbed from equilibrium
will be to counteract the perturbation
1889 – Walther Nernst relates the voltage of electrochemical cells to their chemical thermodynamics via the Nernst
equation
1889 – Svante Arrhenius introduces the idea of activation energy for chemical reactions, giving the Arrhenius equation
1893 – Wilhelm Wien discovers the displacement law for a blackbody's maximum specific intensity

1900–1944
1900 – Max Planck suggests that light may be emitted in discrete frequencies, giving his law of black-body radiation
1905 – Albert Einstein argues that the reality of quanta would explain the photoelectric effect
1905 – Einstein mathematically analyzes Brownian motion as a result of random molecular motion
1906 – Nernst presents a formulation of the third law of thermodynamics
1907 – Einstein uses quantum theory to estimate the heat capacity of an Einstein solid
1909 – Constantin Carathéodory develops an axiomatic system of thermodynamics
1910 – Einstein and Marian Smoluchowski find the Einstein–Smoluchowski formula for the attenuation coefficient due
to density fluctuations in a gas
1911 – Paul Ehrenfest and Tatjana Ehrenfest–Afanassjewa publish their classical review on the statistical mechanics
of Boltzmann, Begriffliche Grundlagen der statistischen Auffassung in der Mechanik
1912 – Peter Debye gives an improved heat capacity estimate by allowing low-frequency phonons
1916 – Sydney Chapman and David Enskog systematically develop the kinetic theory of gases.
1916 – Einstein considers the thermodynamics of atomic spectral lines and predicts stimulated emission

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1919 – James Jeans discovers that the dynamical constants of motion determine the distribution function for a system
of particles
1920 – Megh Nad Saha states his ionization equation
1923 – Debye and Erich Hückel publish a statistical treatment of the dissociation of electrolytes
1924 – Satyendra Nath Bose introduces Bose–Einstein statistics, in a paper translated by Einstein
1926 – Enrico Fermi and Paul Dirac introduce Fermi–Dirac statistics for fermions
1927 – John von Neumann introduces the density matrix representation and establishes quantum statistical
mechanics
1928 – John B. Johnson discovers Johnson noise in a resistor
1928 – Harry Nyquist derives the fluctuation-dissipation theorem, a relationship to explain Johnson noise in a resistor
1929 – Lars Onsager derives the Onsager reciprocal relations
1938 – Anatoly Vlasov proposes the Vlasov equation for a correct dynamical description of ensembles of particles
with collective long range interaction.
1939 – Nikolay Krylov and Nikolay Bogolyubov give the first consistent microscopic derivation of the Fokker-Planck
equation in the single scheme of classical and quantum mechanics.
1942 – Joseph L. Doob states his theorem on Gauss–Markov processes
1944 – Lars Onsager gives an analytic solution to the 2-dimensional Ising model, including its phase transition

1945–present
1945–1946 – Nikolay Bogoliubov develops a general method for a microscopic derivation of kinetic equations for
classical statistical systems using BBGKY hierarchy
1947 – Nikolay Bogoliubov and Kirill Gurov extend this method for a microscopic derivation of kinetic equations for
quantum statistical systems
1948 – Claude Elwood Shannon establishes information theory
1957 – Aleksandr Solomonovich Kompaneets derives his Compton scattering Fokker–Planck equation
1957 – Ryogo Kubo derives the first of the Green-Kubo relations for linear transport coefficients
1957 – Edwin T. Jaynes gives MaxEnt interpretation of thermodynamics from information theory.
1960–1965 – Dmitry Zubarev develops the method of non-equilibrium statistical operator, which becomes a classical
tool in the statistical theory of non-equilibrium processes
1972 – Jacob Bekenstein suggests that black holes have an entropy proportional to their surface area
1974 – Stephen Hawking predicts that black holes will radiate particles with a black-body spectrum which can cause
black hole evaporation
1977 – Ilya Prigogine wins the Nobel prize for his work on dissipative structures in thermodynamic systems far from
equilibrium. The importation and dissipation of energy could reverse the 2nd law of thermodynamics

See also
History of physics
History of thermodynamics
Timeline of information theory
List of notable textbooks in statistical mechanics

References
1. Hooke, Robert, Robert (1965). Micrographia. s.l.: Science Heritage. p. 12.

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