A History of Thermodynamics: Homage to Sadi Carnot’s Réflexions sur la puissance motrice du feu 1824–2024

In 1824, Sadi Carnot’s Réflexions sur la puissance motrice du feu gave a new theoretical form to the problem of heat engines, motive power, and the transformation of heat into work. Two centuries later, the bicentenary of Carnot’s publication was marked by the international Carnot Lille 2024 colloquium and exhibition at the University of Lille, from which this coordinated two-volume work has emerged. This second volume of the two-volume work follows the afterlife of the Réflexions of Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot (1796–1832) through textual transmission, English translation, archival documentation, scientific reception, and the long transformation of thermodynamics from nineteenth-century heat theory to contemporary questions of entropy, irreversibility, information, and modern physical theory. Conceived in close continuity with Volume 1, this book examines the intellectual trajectories through which Carnot’s work was reread, reformulated, translated, and incorporated into wider scientific traditions. It explores the nineteenth-century reception of the Réflexions , the delayed recognition of Carnot’s contribution, the role of editions and translations, and the ways in which his ideal cycle and principle of maximum efficiency entered the foundations of thermodynamics. It also extends the inquiry towards later and contemporary developments: entropy, irreversibility, statistical and non-equilibrium thermodynamics, finite-time approaches, modern energy-conversion problems, and Carnotian reasoning within physics. Alongside these interpretive chapters, it includes a substantial textual and documentary apparatus, with a revised English translation, commentary, bibliographical reconstruction, and archival materials concerning Sadi, Lazare, and the wider scientific and institutional world of the Carnot family. Where Volume 1 establishes the historical, institutional, and scientific foundations of Carnot’s work, Volume 2 shows how those foundations became a long-lasting conceptual resource for the history of thermodynamics, for the study of scientific texts and archives, and for modern reflections on engines, cycles, efficiency, entropy, and irreversibility. Together, the two volumes offer historians, scientists, and archive scholars an instrument for understanding Carnot’s place in thermodynamics’ long formation as a scientific and documentary field.