Graham's law has come to denote an important class of finely divided materials. Around the time Graham did his work, the concept of molecular weight was being established largely through the measurements of gases. Daniel Bernoulli suggested in 1738 in his book Hydrodynamica that heat increases in proportion to the velocity, and thus kinetic energy, of gas particles. Italian physicist Amedeo Avogadro also suggested in 1811 that equal volumes of different gases contain equal numbers of molecules. Thus, the relative molecular weights of two gases are equal to the ratio of weights of equal volumes of the gases. Avogadro's insight together with
Inversion temperature Inversion temperature The inversion temperature in thermodynamics and cryogenics is the critical temperature below which a non-ideal gas (all gases in reality) that is expanding at constant enthalpy will experience a temperature decrease, and above which will experience a temperature increase. This temperature change is known as the Joule-Thomson effect, and is exploited in the liquefaction of gases. Inversion temperature depends on the nature of the gas. For a van der Waals gas we can calculate the enthalpy formula_1 using statistical mechanics as where formula_3 is the number of molecules, formula_4 is volume, formula_5 is temperature (in the Kelvin scale),