An Experimental Enquiry Concerning the Source of the Heat which is Excited by Friction

"An Experimental Enquiry Concerning the Source of the Heat which is Excited by Friction" (1798), which was published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, is a scientific paper by Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford that provided a substantial challenge to established theories of heat and began the 19th century revolution in thermodynamics.

Rumford was an opponent of the caloric theory of heat which held that heat was a fluid that could be neither created nor destroyed. He had further developed the view that all gases and liquids were absolute non-conductors of heat. His views were out of step with the accepted science of the time and the latter theory had particularly been attacked by John Dalton and John Leslie.

Rumford was heavily influenced by the argument from design and it is likely that he wished to grant water a privileged and providential status in the regulation of human life.

Though Rumford was to come to associate heat with motion, there is no evidence that he was committed to the kinetic theory or the principle of vis viva.

In his 1798 paper, Rumford acknowledged that he had predecessors in the notion that heat was a form of motion. Those predecessors included Francis Bacon,Robert Boyle,Robert Hooke,John Locke, and Henry Cavendish.

Rumford had observed the frictional heat generated by boring cannon at the arsenal in Munich. Rumford immersed a cannon barrel in water and arranged for a specially blunted boring tool. He showed that the water could be boiled within roughly two and a half hours and that the supply of frictional heat was seemingly inexhaustible. Rumford confirmed that no physical change had taken place in the material of the cannon by comparing the specific heats of the material machined away and that remaining were the same.

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