While teaching chemistry in Riga Polytechnic Institute, Wilhelm Ostwald became convinced that certain reactions could only be explained in terms of energy, without the need of invoking the hypothesis of the existence of atoms. He was inspired by Josiah Willard Gibbs's work on thermodynamics. During an inaugural lecture in 1887 in Leipzig University, Ostwald outlined his program of energetics as an alternative to atomic theory. In his second edition of his textbook on physical chemistry of 1892, he stressed that energetic ideas should avoid all atomistic considerations. He opposed the reduction of chemistry to mechanics and advocated for the reduction of mass and matter to energy.
In parallel, Georg Helm published his energy principle in The Theory of Energy () in 1887, as an extension to the principle of conservation of energy. In his essay of 1890, he proposed to reduce mechanics to energetics by means of his principle. In 1892, he proposed to do the same for electricity and magnetism. His principle can be written as 
where dU is a change in the internal energy of a system, T is the temperature, dS is a change in the entropy, p is the pressure and dV a change in volume. This principle recovers the first law of thermodynamics only when the equality holds. Helm changed the equal sign into an inequality in the hope to account for irreversible processes.