Temperature of work done on the work reservoir, and the first law of thermodynamics. The amounts of energy transferred as heat respectively from reservoir 1 and from reservoir 2 may then be denoted respectively and . Then the absolute or thermodynamic temperatures, and , of the reservoirs are defined so that to be such that Kelvin's original work postulating absolute temperature was published in 1848. It was based on the work of Carnot, before the formulation of the first law of thermodynamics. Kelvin wrote in his 1848 paper that his scale was absolute in the sense that it was defined "independently
Scale of temperature °C to 1085 °C). When pressure approaches zero, all real gas will behave like ideal gas, that is, of a mole of gas relying only on temperature. Therefore, we can design a scale with as its argument. Of course any bijective function will do, but for convenience's sake linear function is the best. Therefore, we define it as The ideal gas scale is in some sense a "mixed" scale. It relies on the universal properties of gas, a big advance from just a particular substance. But still it is empirical since it puts gas at a special position and thus