Timeline of thermodynamics

Before 1800

1650 – Otto von Guericke builds the first vacuum pump

1660 – Robert Boyle experimentally discovers Boyle's Law, relating the pressure and volume of a gas (published 1662)

1665 – Robert Hooke stated: "Heat being nothing else but a very brisk and vehement agitation of the parts of a body."

1669 – J.J. Becher puts forward a theory of combustion involving combustible earth (Latin terra pinguis).

1676–1689 – Gottfried Leibniz develops the concept of vis viva, a limited version of the conservation of energy

1679 – Denis Papin designed a steam digester which inspired the development of the piston-and-cylinder steam engine.

1694–1734 – Georg Ernst Stahl names Becher's combustible earth as phlogiston and develops the theory

1698 – Thomas Savery patents an early steam engine

1702 – Guillaume Amontons introduces the concept of absolute zero, based on observations of gases

1738 – Daniel Bernoulli publishes Hydrodynamica, initiating the kinetic theory

1749 – Émilie du Châtelet, in her French translation and commentary on Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, derives the conservation of energy from the first principles of Newtonian mechanics.

1761 – Joseph Black discovers that ice absorbs heat without changing its temperature when melting

1772 – Black's student Daniel Rutherford discovers nitrogen, which he calls phlogisticated air, and together they explain the results in terms of the phlogiston theory

1776 – John Smeaton publishes a paper on experiments related to power, work, momentum, and kinetic energy, supporting the conservation of energy

1777 – Carl Wilhelm Scheele distinguishes heat transfer by thermal radiation from that by convection and conduction

1783 – Antoine Lavoisier discovers oxygen and develops an explanation for combustion; in his paper "Réflexions sur le phlogistique", he deprecates the phlogiston theory and proposes a caloric theory

1784 – Jan Ingenhousz describes Brownian motion of charcoal particles on water

1791 – Pierre Prévost shows that all bodies radiate heat, no matter how hot or cold they are

1798 – Count Rumford (Benjamin Thompson) performs measurements of the frictional heat generated in boring cannons and develops the idea that heat is a form of kinetic energy; his measurements are inconsistent with caloric theory, but are also sufficiently imprecise as to leave room for doubt.

1800–1847

1802 – Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac publishes Charles's law, discovered (but unpublished) by Jacques Charles around 1787; this shows the dependency between temperature and volume. Gay-Lussac also formulates the law relating temperature with pressure (the pressure law, or Gay-Lussac's law)

1804 – Sir John Leslie observes that a matte black surface radiates heat more effectively than a polished surface, suggesting the importance of black body radiation

1805 – William Hyde Wollaston defends the conservation of energy in On the Force of Percussion

1808 – John Dalton defends caloric theory in A New System of Chemistry and describes how it combines with matter, especially gases; he proposes that the heat capacity of gases varies inversely with atomic weight

1810 – Sir John Leslie freezes water to ice artificially

1813 – Peter Ewart supports the idea of the conservation of energy in his paper On the measure of moving force; the paper strongly influences Dalton and his pupil, James Joule

1819 – Pierre Louis Dulong and Alexis Thérèse Petit give the Dulong-Petit law for the specific heat capacity of a crystal

1820 – John Herapath develops some ideas in the kinetic theory of gases but mistakenly associates temperature with molecular momentum rather than kinetic energy; his work receives little attention other than from Joule

1822 – Joseph Fourier formally introduces the use of dimensions for physical quantities in his Théorie Analytique de la Chaleur

1822 – Marc Seguin writes to John Herschel supporting the conservation of energy and kinetic theory

1824 – Sadi Carnot analyzes the efficiency of steam engines using caloric theory; he develops the notion of a reversible process and, in postulating that no such thing exists in nature, lays the foundation for the second law of thermodynamics, and initiating the science of thermodynamics

1827 – Robert Brown discovers the Brownian motion of pollen and dye particles in water

1831 – Macedonio Melloni demonstrates that black body radiation can be reflected, refracted, and polarised in the same way as light

1834 – Émile Clapeyron popularises Carnot's work through a graphical and analytic formulation. He also combined Boyle's Law, Charles's Law, and Gay-Lussac's Law to produce a Combined Gas Law. PV/T = k

1841 – Julius Robert von Mayer, an amateur scientist, writes a paper on the conservation of energy, but his lack of academic training leads to its rejection

1842 – Mayer makes a connection between work, heat, and the human metabolism based on his observations of blood made while a ship's surgeon; he calculates the mechanical equivalent of heat

1842 – William Robert Grove demonstrates the thermal dissociation of molecules into their constituent atoms, by showing that steam can be disassociated into oxygen and hydrogen, and the process reversed

1843 – John James Waterston fully expounds the kinetic theory of gases, but is ridiculed and ignored

1843 – James Joule experimentally finds the mechanical equivalent of heat

1845 – Henri Victor Regnault added Avogadro's Law to the Combined Gas Law to produce the Ideal Gas Law. PV = nRT

1846 – Karl-Hermann Knoblauch publishes De calore radiante disquisitiones experimentis quibusdam novis illustratae

1846 – Grove publishes an account of the general theory of the conservation of energy in On The Correlation of Physical Forces

1847 – Hermann von Helmholtz publishes a definitive statement of the conservation of energy, the first law of thermodynamics

1848–1899

1848 – William Thomson extends the concept of absolute zero from gases to all substances

1849 – William John Macquorn Rankine calculates the correct relationship between saturated vapour pressure and temperature using his hypothesis of molecular vortices

1850 – Rankine uses his vortex theory to establish accurate relationships between the temperature, pressure, and density of gases, and expressions for the latent heat of evaporation of a liquid; he accurately predicts the surprising fact that the apparent specific heat of saturated steam will be negative

1850 – Rudolf Clausius gives the first clear joint statement of the first and second law of thermodynamics, abandoning the caloric theory, but preserving Carnot's principle

1851 – Thomson gives an alternative statement of the second law

1852 – Joule and Thomson demonstrate that a rapidly expanding gas cools, later named the Joule–Thomson effect or Joule–Kelvin effect

1854 – Helmholtz puts forward the idea of the heat death of the universe

1854 – Clausius establishes the importance of dQ/T (Clausius's theorem), but does not yet name the quantity

1854 – Rankine introduces his thermodynamic function, later identified as entropy

1856 – August Krönig publishes an account of the kinetic theory of gases, probably after reading Waterston's work

1857 – Clausius gives a modern and compelling account of the kinetic theory of gases in his On the nature of motion called heat

1859 – James Clerk Maxwell discovers the distribution law of molecular velocities

1859 – Gustav Kirchhoff shows that energy emission from a black body is a function of only temperature and frequency

1862 – "Disgregation," a precursor of entropy, was defined in 1862 by Clausius as the magnitude of the degree of separation of molecules of a body

1865 – Clausius introduces the modern macroscopic concept of entropy

1865 – Josef Loschmidt applies Maxwell's theory to estimate the number-density of molecules in gases, given observed gas viscosities.

1867 – Maxwell asks whether Maxwell's demon could reverse irreversible processes

1870 – Clausius proves the scalar virial theorem

1872 – Ludwig Boltzmann states the Boltzmann equation for the temporal development of distribution functions in phase space, and publishes his H-theorem

1873 - Johannes Diderik van der Waals formulates his equation of state

1874 – Thomson formally states the second law of thermodynamics

1876 – Josiah Willard Gibbs publishes the first of two papers (the second appears in 1878) which discuss phase equilibria, statistical ensembles, the free energy as the driving force behind chemical reactions, and chemical thermodynamics in general.

1876 – Loschmidt criticises Boltzmann's H theorem as being incompatible with microscopic reversibility (Loschmidt's paradox).

1877 – Boltzmann states the relationship between entropy and probability

1879 – Jožef Stefan observes that the total radiant flux from a blackbody is proportional to the fourth power of its temperature and states the Stefan–Boltzmann law

1884 – Boltzmann derives the Stefan–Boltzmann blackbody radiant flux law from thermodynamic considerations

1888 – Henri-Louis Le Chatelier states his principle that the response of a chemical system perturbed from equilibrium will be to counteract the perturbation

1889 – Walther Nernst relates the voltage of electrochemical cells to their chemical thermodynamics via the Nernst equation

1889 – Svante Arrhenius introduces the idea of activation energy for chemical reactions, giving the Arrhenius equation

1893 – Wilhelm Wien discovers the displacement law for a blackbody's maximum specific intensity

1900–1944

1900 – Max Planck suggests that light may be emitted in discrete frequencies, giving his law of black-body radiation

1905 – Albert Einstein argues that the reality of quanta would explain the photoelectric effect

1905 – Einstein mathematically analyzes Brownian motion as a result of random molecular motion

1906 – Nernst presents a formulation of the third law of thermodynamics

1907 – Einstein uses quantum theory to estimate the heat capacity of an Einstein solid

1909 – Constantin Carathéodory develops an axiomatic system of thermodynamics

1910 – Einstein and Marian Smoluchowski find the Einstein–Smoluchowski formula for the attenuation coefficient due to density fluctuations in a gas

1911 – Paul Ehrenfest and Tatjana Ehrenfest–Afanassjewa publish their classical review on the statistical mechanics of Boltzmann, Begriffliche Grundlagen der statistischen Auffassung in der Mechanik

1912 – Peter Debye gives an improved heat capacity estimate by allowing low-frequency phonons

1916 – Sydney Chapman and David Enskog systematically develop the kinetic theory of gases.

1916 – Einstein considers the thermodynamics of atomic spectral lines and predicts stimulated emission

1919 – James Jeans discovers that the dynamical constants of motion determine the distribution function for a system of particles

1920 – Megh Nad Saha states his ionization equation

1923 – Debye and Erich Huckel publish a statistical treatment of the dissociation of electrolytes

1924 – Satyendra Nath Bose introduces Bose–Einstein statistics, in a paper translated by Einstein

1926 – Enrico Fermi and Paul Dirac introduce Fermi–Dirac statistics for fermions

1927 – John von Neumann introduces the density matrix representation and establishes quantum statistical mechanics

1928 – John B. Johnson discovers Johnson noise in a resistor

1928 – Harry Nyquist derives the fluctuation-dissipation theorem, a relationship to explain Johnson noise in a resistor

1929 – Lars Onsager derives the Onsager reciprocal relations

1938 – Anatoly Vlasov proposes the Vlasov equation for a correct dynamical description of ensembles of particles with collective long range interaction.

1939 – Nikolay Krylov and Nikolay Bogolyubov give the first consistent microscopic derivation of the Fokker-Planck equation in the single scheme of classical and quantum mechanics.

1942 – Joseph L. Doob states his theorem on Gauss–Markov processes

1944 – Lars Onsager gives an analytic solution to the 2-dimensional Ising model, including its phase transition

1945–present

1945–1946 – Nikolay Bogoliubov develops a general method for a microscopic derivation of kinetic equations for classical statistical systems using BBGKY hierarchy

1947 – Nikolay Bogoliubov and Kirill Gurov extend this method for a microscopic derivation of kinetic equations for quantum statistical systems

1948 – Claude Elwood Shannon establishes information theory

1957 – Aleksandr Solomonovich Kompaneets derives his Compton scattering Fokker–Planck equation

1957 – Ryogo Kubo derives the first of the Green-Kubo relations for linear transport coefficients

1957 – Edwin T. Jaynes gives MaxEnt interpretation of thermodynamics from information theory.

1960–1965 – Dmitry Zubarev develops the method of non-equilibrium statistical operator, which becomes a classical tool in the statistical theory of non-equilibrium processes

1972 – Jacob Bekenstein suggests that black holes have an entropy proportional to their surface area

1974 – Stephen Hawking predicts that black holes will radiate particles with a black-body spectrum which can cause black hole evaporation

1977 – Ilya Prigogine wins the Nobel prize for his work on dissipative structures in thermodynamic systems far from equilibrium. The importation and dissipation of energy could reverse the 2nd law of thermodynamics