Everything about Ludwig A Colding totally explained
Ludwig August Colding (
13 July,
1815 -
21 March,
1888) was a
Danish civil engineer and
physicist who articulated the principle of
conservation of energy contemporaneouly with, and independently of,
James Prescott Joule and
Julius Robert von Mayer though his contribution was largely overlooked and neglected.
Life
Born
Holbæk,
Denmark, his father, Andreas Christian, had been an
officer in the Danish
privateer service. Ludwig's mother, Anna Sophie, was the daughter of a
clergyman and imbued the household with a deeply religious sentiment. Around the time of Ludwig's birth, his father retired from seafaring and took up a position as a
farm manager. He seems to have been particularly unsuited to such a profession and this, together with the upheavals of the
Napoleonic Wars in Denmark, subjected the young Ludwig to a rather irregular childhood and schooling.
Hans Christian Ørsted was an old family friend and arranged for Colding to serve an
apprenticeship under a
craftsman in
Copenhagen, Colding achieving the status of
journeyman in
1836. Ørsted had, by this stage, become something of a mentor to the young Colding and encouraged him to enroll at the
Copenhagen Polytechnic Institute. The Institute had been founded at Ørsted's initiative and he offered continual advice and support to the young Colding. of nature." Colding was influenced by
D'Alembert's principle of "lost forces", Ørsted, the
Naturphilosophie to which Ørsted subscribed and his own religious upbringing..
Colding first fulfilled his ambition to work alongside Ørsted, who was conducting experiments on the
compressibility of water, in
1839. He summarised this work with a review of other data on compression and
friction of various materials in his first published
scientific paper.. In this work, he went on to state that "the quantities of heat evolved are, in every case, proportional to the lost moving forces" though he didn't calculate a
mechanical equivalent of heat as Joule was to do in the same year. than the
modern value (4.1860
J·
cal-1) at a time when Joule had measured 4.159 J·cal
-1.. A subsequent calculation by Colding in
1852 yielded a value only 3% below modern values.
Legacy
Colding's thermodynamic work was neglected both in his native Denmark and internationally though, from an historical perspective, he seems to deserve no less credit in the development of the concept of energy than Joule or Mayer. However, his contributions to meteorology and the built environment of Copenhagen are notable in themselves.
Honours
Further Information
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