Joule’s conviction that heat and work could be turned into each other flew in the face of a key assumption that Carnot had made, namely that heat, being caloric, could not be created or destroyed. Then, in the autumn of 1848, William Thomson obtained a copy of Carnot’s original treatise. Whatever doubts Joule had seeded in his mind, Thomson was now convinced the Frenchman’s work was too important to remain in scientific obscurity.
