The American Inventor of Modern Thermodynamics
By Lee S. Langston
J. Willard Gibbs’s fundamental discoveries in the 19th century are helping today’s engineers design and build hydrogen-fueled jet engines.
This Article From Issue
March-April 2024
Volume 112, Number 2
Page 88
Thermodynamics is the science and engineering of the transformation of matter and energy. Life is matter, and energy is the basis of all life, so thermodynamic laws and principles touch all of us. “Thermo,” as it is popularly known by students, emerged at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the 1760s, with the invention of “heat engines” such as the steam engine. Famed innovators in the field of thermodynamics include the engineers Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot and James Watt, and the scientists Lord Kelvin (William Thomson) and Rudolf Clausius.
QUICK TAKE
- Thermodynamics explains the relationships between fundamental properties such as energy, entropy, and temperature, enabling engineers to build extremely efficient engines.
- Physicist J. Willard Gibbs helped to build a unified theory of thermodynamics that included properties relevant to other processes, such as chemical reactions.
- Today, engineers are using Gibbs’s modern thermodynamics in designing hydrogen-fueled jet engines that could help eliminate carbon dioxide emissions produced by airplanes.
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