Thermodynamics
The classicalCarnot heat engine
Branches Classical Statistical Chemical Quantum thermodynamics Equilibrium / Non-equilibrium
Laws Zeroth First Second Third
Systems Closed system Open system Isolated system State Equation of state Ideal gas Real gas State of matter Phase (matter) Equilibrium Control volume Instruments Processes Isobaric Isochoric Isothermal Adiabatic Isentropic Isenthalpic Quasistatic Polytropic Free expansion Reversibility Irreversibility Endoreversibility Cycles Heat engines Heat pumps Thermal efficiency
System properties Note:Conjugate variables initalics Property diagrams Intensive and extensive properties Process functions Work Heat Functions of state Temperature / Entropy (introduction) Pressure / Volume Chemical potential / Particle number Vapor quality Reduced properties
Material properties Property databases Specific heat capacity  ${\displaystyle c=}$ ${\displaystyle T}$ ${\displaystyle \mathrm{\partial }S}$ ${\displaystyle N}$ ${\displaystyle \mathrm{\partial }T}$ Compressibility  ${\displaystyle \beta =-}$ ${\displaystyle 1}$ ${\displaystyle \mathrm{\partial }V}$ ${\displaystyle V}$ ${\displaystyle \mathrm{\partial }p}$ Thermal expansion  ${\displaystyle \alpha =}$ ${\displaystyle 1}$ ${\displaystyle \mathrm{\partial }V}$ ${\displaystyle V}$ ${\displaystyle \mathrm{\partial }T}$
Equations Carnot's theorem Clausius theorem Fundamental relation Ideal gas law Maxwell relations Onsager reciprocal relations Bridgman's equations Table of thermodynamic equations
Potentials Free energy Free entropy Internal energy ${\displaystyle U(S,V)}$ Enthalpy ${\displaystyle H(S,p)=U+pV}$ Helmholtz free energy ${\displaystyle A(T,V)=U-TS}$ Gibbs free energy ${\displaystyle G(T,p)=H-TS}$
History Culture History General Entropy Gas laws "Perpetual motion" machines Philosophy Entropy and time Entropy and life Brownian ratchet Maxwell's demon Heat death paradox Loschmidt's paradox Synergetics Theories Caloric theory Vis viva("living force") Mechanical equivalent of heat Motive power Key publications An Inquiry Concerning the Source ... Friction On the Equilibrium of Heterogeneous Substances Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire Timelines Thermodynamics Heat engines Art Education Maxwell's thermodynamic surface Entropy as energy dispersal
Scientists Bernoulli Boltzmann Bridgman Carathéodory Carnot Clapeyron Clausius de Donder Duhem Gibbs von Helmholtz Joule Kelvin Lewis Massieu Maxwell von Mayer Nernst Onsager Planck Rankine Smeaton Stahl Tait Thompson van der Waals Waterston
Other Nucleation Self-assembly Self-organization
Category
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Thistimeline of heat engine technology describes howheat engines have been known since antiquity but have been made into increasingly useful devices since the 17th century as a better understanding of the processes involved was gained. A heat engine is any system that converts heat tomechanical energy, which can then be used to domechanical work.They continue to be developed today.

Inengineering andthermodynamics, a heat engine performs the conversion ofheatenergy tomechanical work by exploiting thetemperature gradient between a hot "source" and a cold "sink". Heat istransferred to the sink from the source, and in this process some of the heat is converted intowork.

Aheat pump is a heat engine run in reverse. Work is used to create a heat differential. The timeline includes devices classed as both engines and pumps, as well as identifying significant leaps in human understanding.

• Prehistory – Thefire piston used by tribes insoutheast Asia and thePacific islands to kindle fire.
• c. 450 BC –Archytas of Tarentum used a jet of steam to propel a toy wooden bird suspended on wire.^[1]
• c. 50 AD –Hero of Alexandria's Engine, also known asAeolipile. Demonstrates rotary motion produced by the reaction from jets of steam.^[2]
• c. 10th century – China develops the earliestfire lances which were spear-like weapons combining a bamboo tube containinggunpowder and shrapnel like projectiles tied to a spear.
• c 12th century – China, the earliest depiction of agun showing a metal body and a tight-fitting projectile which maximises the conversion of the hot gases to forward motion.^[3]
• 1125 – Gerbert, a professor in the schools at Rheims designed and built an organ blown by air escaping from a vessel in which it was compressed by heated water.^[4]
• 1232 – First recorded use of arocket. In a battle between the Chinese and the Mongols. ( seeTimeline of rocket and missile technology for a view of rocket development through time.)
• c. 1500 –Leonardo da Vinci builds theArchitonnerre, a steam-powered cannon.^[5]
• 1543 – Blasco de Garay, a Spanish naval officer demonstrates a boat propelled without oars or sail that utilised the reaction from a jet issued from a large boiling kettle of water.^[4]
• 1551 –Taqi al-Din demonstrates asteam turbine, used to rotate aspit.^[6]

• 1629 –Giovanni Branca demonstrates asteam turbine.^[7]
• 1662 –Robert Boyle publishesBoyle's Law which defines the relationship between volume and pressure in a gas at a constant temperature.^[8]
• 1665 –Edward Somerset, the Second Marquess of Worcester builds a working steam fountain.^[9]
• 1680 –Christiaan Huygens publishes a design for a piston engine powered bygunpowder but it is never built.
• 1690 –Denis Papin – produces design for the first piston steam engine.
• 1698 –Thomas Savery builds a pistonless steam-powered waterpump for pumping water out of mines.

• 1707 –Denis Papin – produces design for his second piston steam engine in conjunction withGottfried Leibniz.
• 1712 –Thomas Newcomen builds the first commercially successfulpiston-and-cylinder steam-powered water pump for pumping water out of mines. It is known as anatmospheric engine and operates by condensing steam in a cylinder to produce a vacuum which moves the piston by atmospheric pressure.
• 1748 –William Cullen demonstrates the first artificialrefrigeration in a public lecture at the University of Glasgow in Scotland.
• 1759 –John Harrison uses abimetallic strip in his third marine chronometer (H3) to compensate for temperature-induced changes in the balance spring. This converts thermal expansion and contraction in two dissimilar solids to mechanical work.
• 1769 –James Watt patents his first improved atmospheric steam engine, seeWatt steam engine with a separate condenser outside the cylinder, doubling the efficiency of earlier engines.
• 1787 –Jacques Charles formulatesCharles's law which describes the relationship between a gas's volume and temperature. He does not publish this however and it is not recognised untilJoseph Louis Gay-Lussac develops and references it in 1802.
• 1791 –John Barber patents the idea of agas turbine.
• 1799 –Richard Trevithick builds the first high pressure steam engine. This used the force from pressurized steam to move the piston.

• 1802 –Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac developsGay-Lussac's law which describes the relationship between a gas's pressure and temperature.
• 1807 –Nicéphore Niépce installed his 'moss, coal-dust and resin' fuelledPyréolophore internal combustion engine in a boat and powered up the riverSaone in France.
• 1807 – Franco/Swiss engineerFrançois Isaac de Rivaz built theDe Rivaz engine, powered by the internal combustion of hydrogen and oxygen mixture and used it to power a wheeled vehicle.^[10]
• 1816 –Robert Stirling inventedStirling engine, a type ofhot air engine.
• 1824 –Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot developed theCarnot cycle and the associated hypotheticalCarnot heat engine that is the basic theoretical model for allheat engines. This gives the first early insight into thesecond law of thermodynamics.
• 1834 –Jacob Perkins, obtained the first patent for a vapor-compression refrigeration system.
• 1850s –Rudolf Clausius sets out the concept of thethermodynamic system and positionedentropy as being that in any irreversible process a small amount of heat energy δQ is incrementally dissipated across the system boundary
• 1859 –Etienne Lenoir developed the first commercially successfulinternal combustion engine, a single-cylinder, two-stroke engine with electric ignition ofillumination gas (not gasoline).
• 1861 –Alphonse Beau de Rochas of France originates the concept of the four-stroke internal-combustion engine by emphasizing the previously unappreciated importance of compressing the fuel–air mixture before ignition.
• 1861 –Nicolaus Otto patents a two-stroke internal combustion engine building on Lenoir's.
• 1867 –James Clerk Maxwell postulated thethought experiment that later became known asMaxwell's demon. This appeared to violate thesecond law of thermodynamics and was the beginning of the idea that information was part of the physics of heat.
• 1872 –Pulsometer steam pump, a pistonless pump, patented by Charles Henry Hall. It was inspired by the Savery steam pump.
• 1873 – The British chemist SirWilliam Crookes invents thelight mill a device which turns the radiant heat of light directly into rotary motion.
• 1877 – TheoristLudwig Boltzmann visualized a probabilistic way to measure the entropy of an ensemble of ideal gas particles, in which he defined entropy to be proportional to the logarithm of the number of microstates such a gas could occupy.
• 1877 –Nicolaus Otto patents a practical four-stroke internal combustion engine (U.S. patent 194,047)
• 1883 –Samuel Griffin of Bath UK patents asix-stroke internal combustion engine.^[11]
• 1884 –Charles A. Parsons builds the first modernSteam turbine.
• 1886 –Herbert Akroyd Stuart builds the prototypeHot bulb engine, an oil fueledHomogeneous Charge Compression Ignition engine similar to the later diesel but with a lowercompression ratio and running on a fuel air mixture.
• 1887 –Lord Rayleigh discussed the theoretical possibility of athermoacoustic heat engine that could turn a temperature difference directly into mechanical movement using only sound waves. TheRijke tube had already demonstrated this in 1859.
• 1892 –Rudolf Diesel patents theDiesel engine (U.S. patent 608,845) where a high compression ratio generates hot gas which then ignites aninjected fuel. After five years of experimenting and assistance from MAN company, he builds a working diesel engine in 1897.

• Approx 1910 an unknown inventor produces the toy ''Drinking bird'', a toy bird that oscillates continuously on a pivot powered by the evaporation and condensation of a volatile liquid. A wet end and a dry end of the toy produce a slight temperature difference through the evaporation of water.
• 1909, the Dutch physicistHeike Kamerlingh Onnes develops the concept ofenthalpy for the measure of the "useful" work that can be obtained from a closed thermodynamic system at a constant pressure.
• 1913 –Nikola Tesla patents theTesla turbine based on theBoundary layer effect.
• 1926 –Robert Goddard of the US launches the firstliquid-fuel rocket.
• 1929 –Felix Wankel patents theWankel rotary engine (U.S. patent 2,988,008)
• 1929 –  Leó Szilárd, in a refinement of the famous Maxwell's demon scenario conceives of a heat engine that can run on information alone, known as theSzilard engine.
• 1930 – SirFrank Whittle in England patents the first design for a gas turbine forjet propulsion.
• 1933 – French physicistGeorges J. Ranque invents theVortex tube, a fluid flow device without moving parts, that can separate a compressed gas into hot and cold streams.
• 1935 –Ralph H. Fowler invents the title 'the zeroth law of thermodynamics' to summarise postulates made by earlier physicists that thermal equilibrium between systems is atransitive relation.
• 1937 –Hans von Ohain builds agas turbine
• 1940 – HungarianBela Karlovitz working for the Westinghouse company in the US files the first patent for amagnetohydrodynamic generator, which can generate electricity directly from a hot moving gas
• 1942 – R.S. Gaugler of General Motors patents the idea of theHeat pipe, a heat transfer mechanism that combines the principles of both thermal conductivity and phase transition to efficiently manage the transfer of heat between two solid interfaces.
• 1950s – ThePhilips company develop the Stirling-cycleStirling Cryocooler which converts mechanical energy to a temperature difference.
• 1957 – the first demonstration of a practical arc-mode caesium vaporthermionic converter by V. Wilson. Electrons from a hot cathode act as a working fluid which condenses on a cold anode and produces an electric current. Several applications of it were demonstrated in the following decade, including its use withsolar,combustion,radioisotope, andnuclear reactor heat sources.^[12]
• 1959 –  Geusic, Schultz-DuBois and Scoville of Bell Telephone Laboratories USA build aThree Level Maser which runs as aquantum heat engine extracting work from the temperature difference of two heat pools.
• 1962 – William J. Buehler and Frederick Wang discover the Nickel titanium alloy known asNitinol which has a shape memory dependent on its temperature.
• 1962 – Nikolaus Rott reopened the topic.ofthermoacoustic engines described by Lord Rayleigh in 1887 and produced a full theoretical analysis which led to technological development and a working device carried on the Space Shuttle in 1992.
• 1992 – The first practicalmagnetohydrodynamic generators are built in Serbia and the USA.

• 2011 – Shoichi Toyabe and others demonstrate a workingSzilard engine using aphase-contrast microscope equipped with ahigh speed camera connected to a computer.^[13]
• 2011 – Michigan State University builds the firstwave disk engine. An internal combustion engine which does away with pistons, crankshafts and valves, and replaces them with a disc-shaped shock wave generator.^[14]
• 2019 – A working quantum heat engine based on a spin-1/2 system andnuclear magnetic resonance techniques is demonstrated by Roberto Serra and others at theUniversities of Waterloo, and theUniversidade Federal do ABC and Centro Brasileiro de Pesquisas Físicas.^[15]
• 2020 – Anano scale device that can act either as a heat engine or as a refrigerator by utilising quantum effects, is demonstrated by engineers atRIKEN Advanced Device Laboratory.^[16]

Related timelines:

• Timeline of rocket and missile technology – Rockets can be considered to be heat engines. The heat of their exhaust gases is converted into mechanical energy.
• History of thermodynamics
• History of the internal combustion engine
• Timeline of motor and engine technology
• Timeline of steam power
• Timeline of temperature and pressure measurement technology

For a timeline of all human technology see:

• Timeline of historic inventions

• Energy conversion
• Engine technology
• Technology timelines
• Physics timelines
• Transport timelines
• History of thermodynamics

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