Nicolas Carnot
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Nicolas Carnot was a French physicist who lived from 1796 to 1832 and is remembered as the founder of thermodynamics, the science of heat and energy. His groundbreaking work laid the foundation for understanding how heat engines work and helped establish fundamental principles about energy that remain central to physics and engineering today.
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Person
- Born
- 1796-06-01
- Died
- 1832-08-24
via Open Library + Wikidata
Recent publications · Crossref
5 total works indexed
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- End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers
Article
Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot ( French: [nikɔla leɔnaʁ sadi kaʁno]; 1 June 1796 – 24 August 1832) was a French military engineer and physicist. A graduate of the École polytechnique, Carnot served as an officer in the Engineering Arm (le génie) of the French Army. He also pursued scientific studies, and in June 1824 published an essay titled Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire. In that book, which would be his only publication, Carnot developed the first successful theory of the maximum efficiency of heat engines.
Carnot's scientific work attracted little attention during his lifetime, but in 1834 it became the object of a detailed commentary and explanation by another French engineer, Émile Clapeyron. Clapeyron's commentary in turn attracted the attention of William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) and Rudolf Clausius. Thomson used Carnot's analysis to develop an absolute thermodynamic temperature scale, while Clausius used it to define the concept of entropy, thus formalizing the second law of thermodynamics.