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III.
REFLECTIONS ON THE MOTIVE-POWER OF HEAT, AND ON MACHINES FITTED TO DEVELOP THAT POWER.[1]
By S. Carnot.
Every one knows that heat can produce motion. That it possesses vast motive-power no one can doubt, in these days when the steam-engine is everywhere so well known.
To heat also are due the vast movements which take place on the earth. It causes the agitations of the atmosphere, the ascension of clouds, the fall of rain and of meteors, the currents of water which channel the surface of the globe, and of which
- ↑ Sadi Carnot's Réflexions sur la puissance motrice du feu (Paris, Bachelier 1824) was long ago completely exhausted. As but a small number of copies were printed, this remarkable work remained long unknown to the earlier writers on Thermodynamics. It was therefore for the benefit of savants unable to study a work out of print, as well as to render honor to the memory of Sadi Carnot, that the new publishers of the Annales Scientifique de l'École Normale supérieure (ii. series, t. 1, 1872) published a new edition, from which this translation is reproduced.
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