Thermodynamics and motive power. It marked the start of thermodynamics as a modern science. The first thermodynamic textbook was written in 1859 by William Rankine, originally trained as a physicist and a civil and mechanical engineering professor at the University of Glasgow. The first and second laws of thermodynamics emerged simultaneously in the 1850s, primarily out of the works of William Rankine, Rudolf Clausius, and William Thomson (Lord Kelvin). The foundations of statistical thermodynamics were set out by physicists such as James Clerk Maxwell, Ludwig Boltzmann, Max Planck, Rudolf Clausius and J. Willard Gibbs. During the years 1873-76 the American mathematical
First law of thermodynamics process at constant pressure, the heat used to produce expansion is universally interconvertible with work", but this is not a general statement of the first law. The original nineteenth century statements of the first law of thermodynamics appeared in a conceptual framework in which transfer of energy as heat was taken as a primitive notion, not defined or constructed by the theoretical development of the framework, but rather presupposed as prior to it and already accepted. The primitive notion of heat was taken as empirically established, especially through calorimetry regarded as a subject in its own right, prior to thermodynamics.