Biography

Among Fourier's contemporaries who were interested in the theory of heat the most eminent was Sadi Carnot, a son of the eminent geometrician mentioned above. Sadi Carnot was born at Paris in 1796, and died there of cholera in August 1832; he was an officer in the French army. In 1824 he issued a short work entitled Réflexions sur la puissance motrice du feu, in which he attempted to determine in what way heat produced its mechanical effect. He made the mistake of assuming that heat was material, but his essay may be taken as initiating the modern theory of thermodynamics.