12 quotes
Heat can evidently be a cause of motion only by virtue of the changes of volume or of form which it produces in bodies.
Reflections on the Motive Power of Heat (1824)
Savery, Newcomen, Smeaton, the famous Watt, Woolf, Trevithick, and some other English engineers, are the veritable creators of the steam-engine.
Reflections on the Motive Power of Heat (1824)
Iron and heat are... the supporters, the bases, of the mechanic arts.
Reflections on the Motive Power of Heat (1824)
The maximum of motive power resulting from the employment of steam is also the maximum of motive power realizable by any means whatever.1878
Reflections on the Motive Power of Heat (1824)
Notwithstanding the work of all kinds done by steam-engines... their theory is very little understood, and the attempts to improve them are still directed almost by chance.
Reflections on the Motive Power of Heat (1824)
The production of motive power is then due... not to an actual consumption of caloric, but to its transportation from a warm body to a cold body... to its re-establishment of equilibrium...
Reflections on the Motive Power of Heat (1824)
Steam navigation... tends to unite the nations of the earth as inhahitants of one country. ...is not this the same as greatly to shorten distances?
Reflections on the Motive Power of Heat (1824)
We shall have [a complete theory] only when the laws of Physics shall be extended enough, generalized enough, to make known beforehand all the effects of heat acting in a determined manner on any body.
Reflections on the Motive Power of Heat (1824)
To take away to-day from England her steam-engines would be to take away at the same time her coal and iron. It would be to dry up all her sources of wealth, to ruin all on which her prosperity depends, in short, to annihilate that colossal power.
Reflections on the Motive Power of Heat (1824)
[T]he production of heat alone is not sufficient to give birth to the impelling power: it is necessary that there should also be cold; without it, the heat would be useless.
Reflections on the Motive Power of Heat (1824)
There is almost as great a distance between the first apparatus in which the expansive force of steam was displayed and the existing machine, as between the first raft that man ever made and the modern vessel.
Reflections on the Motive Power of Heat (1824)
Nature, in providing us with combustibles on all sides, has given us the power to produce, at all times and in all places, heat and the impelling power which is the result of it. To develop this power, to appropriate it to our uses, is the object of heat-engines.
Reflections on the Motive Power of Heat (1824)