The discovery of the First and Second Laws of thermodynamics are considered in their historical context. The author reviews the lives and works of Count Rumford and Julius Mayer who discovered the First Law, and Sadi Carnot, Rodolphe Clausius and Lord Kelvin who independently discovered the Second Law. Count Rumford made his discovery in 1798 while supervising the manufacture of canon barrels, and the author discusses this in the context of the French Revolution then underway. His work was not widely read, or not well understood, and in 1842, Mayer rediscovered the First Law while on a voyage to the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) – a voyage similar to Darwin's voyage 10 years earlier. The works of Carnot in 1824, Clausius in 1850, and Kelvin in 1852 were published when the Industrial Revolution was making dramatic changes to European society. The author points to the explosive population growth and subsequent migrations out of Europe, as having a similar influence on art as on science. Lord Kelvin wrote that all the mechanical energy of the universe will eventually dissipate into heat. This must have been a difficult notion to conceive of at that time. Van Der Berg suggests that the “scattering” of segments of the European population was consistent with the idea of dissipation implied in the Second Law.

The author explains his approach to historical analysis using a term he coined: “metabletic”. I don't understand the term. However, by doing thorough and wide-ranging research into the events and conditions of the day, and by being an excellent writer, the author has produced some very interesting insights into these major scientific laws. ( )