Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot: Steam

Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot was French physicist, the "father of thermodynamics" (1796–1832). Explore interesting quotes on steam.
Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot: 38 quotes2 likes

“[I]f we should find about us only bodies as hot as our furnaces, how can we condense steam? What should we do with it if once produced?”

Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot

p, 125
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.”

Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot

p, 125
Reflections on the Motive Power of Heat (1824)

“What happens… in a steam-engine…? The caloric developed in the furnace by the effect of the combustion traverses the walls of the boiler, produces steam, and in some way incorporates itself with it. The latter carrying it away, takes it first into the cylinder, where it performs some function, and from thence into the condenser, where it is liquefied by contact with the cold water… [T]he cold water of the condenser takes possession of the caloric… It is heated by the intervention of the steam as if it had been placed directly over the furnace. The steam is here only a means of transporting the caloric.”

Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot

p, 125
Reflections on the Motive Power of Heat (1824)

“The phenomenon of the production of motion by heat has not been considered from a sufficiently general point of view. We have considered it only in machines… [for which] the phenomenon is… incomplete. It becomes difficult to recognize its principles and study its laws. …[T]he principle of the production of motion by heat… must be considered independently of any mechanism or… particular agent. It is necessary to establish principles applicable not only to steam-engines but to all imaginable heat-engines, whatever the working substance and whatever the method by which it is operated.”

Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot

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.”

Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot

p, 125
Reflections on the Motive Power of Heat (1824)

“The production of motion in steam-engines is always accompanied by… the re-establishing of equilibrium in the caloric; that is, its passage from a body in which the temperature is more or less elevated, to another in which it is lower.”

Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot

p, 125
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.”

Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot

p, 125
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.”

Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot

p, 125
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?”

Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot

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.”

Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot

p, 125
Reflections on the Motive Power of Heat (1824)