Thermodynamics is a branch that studies the relationships between work, heat and energy. In this article we will describe the historical context and the development of the thermodynamics.
By definition, machines were the crucial point of Industrial Revolution, the roots of which go deep in the late 18th and early 19th centuries in England. Thus, one of the focal preoccupations of industrialists and scientists became the machines efficiency: the output ratio to input. The more output that could be generated with a given input, the huger the economic advantage and the greater the production to the industrialists and the whole society.
In the days long gone, captains and scientists of industry still accepted as true the permanent motion machine possibility, that is a piece of equipment that, upon receiving an energy initial input, would indefinitely keep on operating without further input. When it came into view that it was possible to convert work into heat, that is a form of energy, it began to look as if possible that heat could be directly converted into work, hence making possible a perpetual motion perfectly reversible machine operation. Regrettably, the strict thermodynamics laws have ruined all those dreams.
The first thermodynamics law is closely related to the name of Robert Mayer (1814-1878). During the 1840s, a German physicist, Julius Robert Mayer published a number of papers that made well-known all the principles that nowadays are known as the energy conservation and, of course, the thermodynamics first law.
Just a several years after Julius Robert Mayer’s publication of the thermodynamics first law, Rudolph Julius Emanuel Clausius (1822-1888), another physicist from Germany, published what is called the thermodynamics second law early version. In the paper, published in 1850, Rudolph Julius Emanuel Clausius provided the statement that heat cannot pass to a hotter body from a colder one. Fifteen years later, Rudolph Julius Emanuel Clausius refined his previous work and introduced the entropy concept that represents the natural systems tendency toward breakdown, and in particular, the tendency for the energy to be dissipated in a system.
The entropy subject directly leads to the thermodynamics third law that was presented in 1905 by Hermann Walter Nernst (1864-1941), who was the chemist from Germany. In accordance with the third law of thermodynamics, at absolute zero temperature, entropy approaches zero too. From this statement, thus, Nernst figured out that, therefore, it is impossible to reach absolute zero.