In 1798, Count Rumford published An Experimental Enquiry Concerning the Source of the Heat which is Excited by Friction, a report on his investigation of the heat produced while manufacturing cannons. He had found that boring a cannon repeatedly does not result in a loss of its ability to produce heat, and therefore no loss of caloric. This suggested that caloric could not be a conserved "substance", though the experimental uncertainties in his experiment were widely debated.
His results were not seen as a "threat" to caloric theory at the time, as this theory was considered to be equivalent to the alternative kinetic theory. In fact, to some of his contemporaries, the results added to the understanding of caloric theory.
Rumfords experiment inspired the work of James Prescott Joule and others towards the middle of the 19th century. In 1850, Rudolf Clausius published a paper showing that the two theories were indeed compatible, as long as the calorists principle of the conservation of heat was replaced by a principle of conservation of energy. Although compatible however, the theories differ significantly in their implications. In modern thermodynamics, heat is usually a transfer of kinetic energy of particles (atoms, molecules) from a hotter to a colder substance.
In later combination with the law of energy conservation, the caloric theory still provides a valuable analogy for some aspects of heat, for example, the emergence of Laplaces equation and Poissons equation in the problems of spatial distribution of heat and temperature.