Discovering the relation between the mechanical work spent and the heat produced by compressing gaseous fluid.
Date: Published in 1853.
Publication: Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Volume 20, Pages 289-298.
William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) read this paper to the Royal Society of Edinburgh on 21 April 1851.
At the time he was a Fellow of St Peter's College, Cambridge, and Professor of Natural Philosophy at Glasgow University.
He states that the object of this paper is to show how 'a complete a complete theoretical view may be obtained of the phenomena experimented on by Joule'.
Thomson refers to Joule's 'entirely new method of treating questions regarding the physical properties of fluids'.
The paper appears on pages 289-298 in this volume of the Society's Transactions.
This paper was later designated as Part 4 of a series of papers on the Dynamical theory of heat. Its paragraphs, here numbered 1-20, were subsequently referred to as paragraphs 61-80. (Information from: Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh Volume 20 (1853) p. 475)
Kelvin refers throughout to the work of scientists who had produced work on the same subject previously, namely: Sadi Carnot, James Prescott Joule and Julius Robert von Mayer.