Reflexions on the Motive Power of Fire: A Critical Edition with the Surviving Scientific Manuscripts

Hardcover, x + 230 pages, b&w figures in text. Weight: 0.45kg / 0.99lb. Ex-university library, marked "withdrawn"; an external stamp on all outer page edges, sparse internal ownership markings (according to the "date due" insert book has been checked out 3 times). Pages are clean, untanned, with unmarked text and firm binding. Boards show faint grubby marks and sunning; spine is extensively sunned with an inventory label across the lower end. No dust jacket. -- 'Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire and on Machines Fitted to Develop that Power', first published in 1824 but unnoticed until 1834, is a significant publication about a generalized theory of heat engines. Considered the founding work of thermodynamics, the book contains the preliminary outline of the second law of thermodynamics, as well as a number of principles such as the Carnot cycle, the Carnot heat engine, Carnot's theorem, and thermodynamic efficiency. Since the 1890s, Sadi Carnot's 'Reflexions on the Motive Power of Fire' has been known to most English readers through the translations by R.H. Thurston and W.F. Magie. For most of the 20th century, Thurston's translation at least was readily available, but never in a full critical edition. In producing such an edition, therefore, the editor of this volume has tried to respond to what was long been recognized as a gap in the literature. In recent reappraisals, the manuscripts that survived Carnot's tragically early death during the cholera epidemic of 1832 have attracted as much attention as the 'Reflexions' itself, and no critical edition would be complete without this supplementary material. Accordingly, in this volume, lengthy appendices are devoted to an outline inventory of the manuscripts (including the non-scientific papers concerning Carnot's military career and the notes on religion and political economy), to translations of the important paper 'Recherche d'une formule.', which was discovered and first published in French tn 1966, and of the scientific notes that were deposited at the Académie des Sciences de Paris in 1878. -- Contents: List of Illustrations; Preface and Acknowledgements; A Note on References; Introduction / Notes; Reflexions on the Motive Power of Fire / Note on the Translation - Text (with Carnot's Footnotes) - Commentary; Appendices: I The Carnot Manuscripts: A Summary - II 'Recherche d'une formule propre a représenter la puissance motrice de la vapeur d'eau' / Notes - III 'Notes on Mathematics, Physics, and Other Subjects' / Notes; Bibliography; Index -- "Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot (1796-1832) was a French military engineer and physicist, often described as the "father of thermodynamics". Like Copernicus, he published only one book, the Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire (Paris, 1824), in which he expressed, at the age of 27 years, the first successful theory of the maximum efficiency of heat engines. In this work he laid the foundations of an entirely new discipline, thermodynamics. Carnot's work attracted little attention during his lifetime, but it was later used by Rudolf Clausius and Lord Kelvin to formalize the second law of thermodynamics and define the concept of entropy.".…