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
Baron Playfair Baron Playfair Baron Playfair, of St Andrews in the County of Fife, was a title in the Peerage of the United Kingdom. It was created on 3 September 1892 for the scientist and Liberal politician Sir Lyon Playfair. He was succeeded by his only son, the second Baron. He was a Brigadier-General in the British Army. His only son, the Hon. Lyon George Henry Lyon Playfair (1888-1915), was a Captain in the Royal Field Artillery and was killed in action in the First World War, unmarried. Consequently, the title became extinct on the death of the second Baron in 1939.