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Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
Gottfried Leibniz, was a German mathematician and philosopher who occupies a prominent place in the history of mathematics. While trying to come up with a what caused the balls to move in what was called "newton's cradle", Gottfried reasoned that whatever caused the ball to move resembled a force that seemed to be transmitted through the balls. He called this physical quantity vis vita (living force) from this he reasoned two types of energy, kinetic energy and gravitational energy. -
Joseph Black
Joseph Black was a French/Scottish physician and chemist, known for his discoveries of latent heat, specific heat, and carbon dioxide. Observed that when a cold object is placed in a cup of hot water, and then removed, the object becomes much warmer. He explained this by struggesting heat was an invisible fluid, called a caloric fluid, which flows naturally from hot to cold things. -
Rumford, Benjamin Thompson
Thompson was an American born British physicist and inventor, his work was a part of the thermodynamics revolution in the 19th century.Thompson experimented with cannons and the heat that was generated from the friction of the motion of the cannon ball being fired from the cannon. He was an active inventor, inventing and improving on furnaces, chimneys, ect. He disproved Black's theory that heat was a liquid but instead something that could be made by motion -
James Prescot Joule
Joule was an English physicist and brewer, born in Salford, Lancashire. He studied heat and discovered its relationship to energy. He discovered that heat flows from a hot object to a cool one, he also discovered that heat is always lost.This led to the invention of the law of conservation of energy and then to the first law of thermodynamics. He invented the electric motor that then replaced steam engines.
