A History of Thermodynamics: Homage to Sadi Carnot’s Réflexions sur la puissance motrice du feu 1824–2024: Historical, Institutional, and Physics–Mathematics Relationship, Vol. 1 - Raffaele Pisano

This book provides a comprehensive documentary reconstruction of Sadi Carnot’s life, manuscripts, contexts, and scientific formation.

In 1824, Sadi Carnot’s Réflexions sur la puissance motrice du feu gave a new theoretical form to the problem of heat engines, motive power, and the transformation of heat into work. Two centuries later, the bicentenary of Carnot’s publication was marked by the international Carnot Lille 2024 colloquium and exhibition at the University of Lille, from which this coordinated two-volume work has emerged.

This first volume of the two-volume work offers a major documentary and historical-scientific reconstruction of Sadi Carnot’s life, intellectual formation, institutional environments, manuscripts, and 1824 Réflexions, placing the emergence of thermodynamics within the culture of engineering, machines, mathematics, and physical theory in post-revolutionary France. At the centre of the volume stands Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot (1796–1832), whose Réflexions became one of the founding texts of modern thermodynamics. Introductory matters, contributions from Carnot family descendants, and selected research essays reconstruct the scientific world in which Carnot’s work took shape: the École polytechnique, the Corps du génie, the Conservatoire des arts et métiers, steam-engine culture, gas theory, the science of machines, and the mathematical traditions that framed the analysis of motive power. Drawing on printed editions, archival documents, manuscript materials, technical sources, and nineteenth-century scientific literature, the book examines the originality of Sadi’s theory of heat engines, the role of the ideal cycle, the question of reversibility, the limit of efficiency, and the relation between mathematical reasoning and engineering practice. Particular attention is given to Carnot’s surviving manuscripts and to the conceptual environment in which his theory acquired its distinctive form.

While Volume 1 reconstructs the historical, institutional, mathematical, and scientific foundations of Carnot’s work, Volume 2 follows its later reception, textual transmission, English translation, archival documentation, and long theoretical legacy across modern thermodynamics.

Together, the two volumes offer historians, scientists, and archive scholars an instrument for understanding Carnot’s place in thermodynamics’ long formation as a scientific and documentary field.