The Coining of the Term "Potential Energy"
Joule Describes the "Air Engine"
The London, Edinburgh, and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science, fourth series, volume 5, 1853. 21.5 x 13 cm, viii, 544pp. Half leather and marbled boards; gilt stamped ownership oval on front and rear cover of the Society of Writers to the Signet. The backstrip is removed from the spine, and is worn, and about a quarter of it is missing on the top and bottom. That said, the binding is tight and the text is very crisp. Save for the spine this would be a very nice copy. This volume contains the following papers, including a very good contribution by Joule, as well as complimentary efforts by Rankine, and a good paper by Gladstone. SOLD
In his paper Joule describes (with the help of some mathematical analysis by William Thomson) his "air-engine" (pg 3) and the hopes he maintained that it would at some point replace the steam engine.(There is no mention of the earlier efforts of Stirling, Cayley, or Ericsson...and of course there's no accounting for the unforeseen development of the steam turbine. Joule's air-engine is the modern Joule cycle ("The cycle for the air engine proposed by Joule. In it air is taken by a pump from a cold chamber and compressed adiabatically until its pressure is equal to that of the air in a hot chamber, into which it is then delivered, thereby displacing an equal amount of hot air into the engine cylinder. Here it expands adiabatically to the temperature of the cold chamber into which it is finally exhausted.")--the original air engines (also known as a heat, hot air, caloric, or Stirling engines), predated the modern internal combustion engine.
I should point out that within Rankine's paper "On the General Law of the Transformation of Energy" on page 106 that Rankine uses the term "potential energy" (differentiating it from "actual energy") in the third paragraph of the paper. (Thomas Young was the first to use the word "energy" in its modern sense --"The product of the mass of a body into the square of its velocity may properly be termed its energy"--in 1802 (the quote coming in 1807 in A Course of Lectures on Natural Philosophy and the Mechanical Arts, p. 52; and Gustave-Gaspard Coriolis in 1829 used the term "kinetic energy" in its modern sense.
The Gladstone paper " traced relations between the atomic weights of analogous elements taking those elements to be analogous which were placed by Gmelin in the same group"--A history of chemical theories and laws by Matthew Moncrieff Pattison Muir, pg 354.
The papers:
- Joule, James Prescott. "On the Economical Production of Mechanical Effect from Chemical Forces, pp 1-5;
- Rankine, William John M. "On the Mechanical Effect of Heat and of Chemical Forces, in a letter to J.P. Joule."
- _____ "On the General Law of the Transformation of Energy", pp 106-117;
- _____. "On the Mechanical Theory of Heat--Specific Heat of Air", pp 437-439;
- _____. "On the Mechanical Theory of Heat--Velocity of Sound in Gases", pp 483-486;
- Gladstone, J.H. "On the Relation Between the Atomic Weights of Analogous Elements". 313-320.
- Thomson, William. pp 393-404
- Hamilton, WIlliam Rowan. On Continued Fractions in Quaternions", pp 321-326
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