1834 Definition
In 1834, the French mining engineer Emile Clapeyron refers to Carnot’s motive power as “mechanical action”. As an example, during the expansion stroke of a piston engine he states that: “the gas will have developed a quantity of mechanical action during its expansion given by the integral of the product of the pressure times the differential of the volume.” Clapeyron then goes on to use graphical methods to show how this "mechanical action", i.e. work in modern terms, could be calculated.
Read more about this topic: Motive Power
Famous quotes containing the word definition:
“... if, as women, we accept a philosophy of history that asserts that women are by definition assimilated into the male universal, that we can understand our past through a male lens—if we are unaware that women even have a history—we live our lives similarly unanchored, drifting in response to a veering wind of myth and bias.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)