Level: introductory+
Reference: Joseph Black, Lectures on the Elements of Chemistry delivered in the University of Edinburgh by the Late Joseph Black, M.D. ... published from his manuscripts by John Robison (1803)
Notes: Joseph Black (1728-1799) was a medical doctor best known today for physical and chemical work, including work on heat. Although he was not the first to realize that different materials had different heat capacities, his exposition and documentation of that fact was important for its clarity. Black also introduced the term latent heat for a heat flow that results in no change of temperature, that is, for the heat flows that accompany phase transitions such as boiling or freezing. (Click here for exercises based on Black's work on latent heat.) He was a pioneer of calorimetric methods. Heat was commonly regarded as a material fluid during Black's time rather than our understanding of it as disorganized kinetic energy. This concept of heat, however, was no obstacle to Black's work. His experiments could be interpreted as naturally under that conception of heat as under ours.
More exercises: Quantitative exercises based on historical concepts of heat and temperature can be found at the end of Duane Roller's chapter in James Bryant Conant's collection of case histories in science: Duane Roller, "The Early Development of the Concepts of Temperature and Heat: the Rise and Decline of the Caloric Theory," in James Bryant Conant, ed., Harvard Case Histories in Experimental Science, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1957), pp. 117-214.
Solutions: To download solutions, go to:
http://web.lemoyne.edu/giunta/classicalcs/blackheat.doc
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