In early 2012, while producing a television documentary, I came across Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire, a slim book self-published in Paris in 1824 by a reclusive young Frenchman called Sadi Carnot. Carnot had died of cholera at thirty-six, believing that his work would be forgotten. Yet within two decades of his death, he was considered the founding father of the science of thermodynamics. Later in the nineteenth century, the great physicist Lord Kelvin said of Carnot’s text, “that little essay was indeed an epoch-making gift to science.”
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