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Leibniz Discovery
Leibniz was a german philosopher and mathmetician who called energy "vis viva" which means living force. He came to the conclusion that whatever made things move had to do with vis viva, or energy. He also created the idea that there are two different types of energy: Kinetic energy and Gravitational potential energy. He used the demenstration of Netwon's cradle to come to this conclusion. -
Joseph Black
Joseph observed that when a cold object is put into a hot substance, it became warmer. He tried to explain why this happened by saying that heat has an invisible fluid called caloric theory and it flows naturally from hot objects to cold objects. -
Benjamin Thompson (Count Rumford)
Count Rumford played off of Joseph's theory but improved it by saying that heat, and also th caloric fluid, is created by motion. He predicted this because of the creation of cannons he was observing one day. Count Rumford was supervising workers as they were boring brass cylinders to create cannons and realized that the heat produced was endless only if the workers kept boring the brass cylinders. So this is how he got the idea that mechanical energy and heat were somehow realted. -
James Prescott Joule
Joule set up two experiments; one to explain that there is a connection between potential energy and heat, and the other one to explain the difference between kinetic energy and heat.