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

'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.