Decades later, Sadi Carnot would become a disciple of this theory.

In fact, the imagery of a caloric fluid would be at the very heart of his famous comparison of heat engines with mill wheels, inspiring him to assert that we may justly compare the motive power of heat with that of a fall of water. Young Clausius became especially enthralled with the life and work of Sadi Carnot, who observed that steam engines, too, were essentially devices for making heat behave in an unnatural way. They were the antithesis of friction, Carnot explained, able to do what Nature could not: Steam engines routinely converted heat into movement. Reflections on the Motive Force of Heat, Carnots main work In 1832, when he was only thirty-six years old, Carnot had contracted cholera. By order of the health officer, therefore, all his personal belongings, including nearly all of his papers, had been burned. According to the French engineer the work produced by a steam engine did not depend solely on the temperature of its boiler; it depended on the difference between the temperatures of its boiler and its radiator. This simply stated formula was considered such a major revelation, Clausius read, it rated being called Carnots Principle. In order to operate, a steam engine needed not just heat but a flow of heat; that occurred only when there was a temperature difference between an engines hot boiler and cool radiator. the production of heat is not sufficient to give birth to the impelling power, Carnot had concluded, it is necessary that there should be cold; without it, the heat would be useless. In plain language, Carnot was suggesting that a steam engine was like a simple mill wheel. Such a wheel worked by tapping water that flowed naturally from a high place to a low place; similarly, a steam engine worked by tapping heat that flowed naturally from a hot boiler to a relatively cool radiator. The bigger and higher the waterfall (picture Niagara Falls), the more horsepower a mill wheel produced; analogously, the bigger and higher the heatfall, the more work an engine produced. According to Carnots Principle, an engine whose boiler and radiator temperatures were, say, 160 and 40 degrees Celsius, respectively, should produce 20 billion foot-pound of work for every ton of coal it burned; theoretically, such an engine could lift a 20 billion-pound weight one foot of the ground or, equivalently, a one-pound weight 20 billion feet off the ground.