The history of this principle is similar to that of all
evolutions.
It is well known that the conservation of energy was, at first,
regarded from the point of view of the reciprocal transformations
between heat and work, and that the principle received its first clear
enunciation in the particular case of the principle of equivalence. It
is, therefore, rightly considered that the scholars who were the first
to doubt the material nature of caloric were the precursors of R.
Mayer; their ideas, however, were the same as those of the celebrated
German doctor, for they sought especially to demonstrate that heat was
a mode of motion.
Without going back to early and isolated attempts like those of Daniel
Bernoulli, who, in his hydrodynamics, propounded the basis of the
kinetic theory of gases, or the researches of Boyle on friction, we
may recall, to show how it was propounded in former times, a rather
forgotten page of the _Memoire sur la Chaleur_, published in 1780 by
Lavoisier and Laplace: "Other physicists," they wrote, after setting
out the theory of caloric, "think that heat is nothing but the result
of the insensible vibrations of matter.
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