ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Equations Embodied: Models of Thermodynamic Surfaces and the Circulation of Knowledge

• In Event: Mathematics in Motion: Equations as Mediators for the Circulation of Knowledge

English Abstract

In the late nineteenth century, mathematicians and mathematical physicists designed physical models to represent the surfaces they represented by equations. The largest collections of such models were made by the German firm of Ludwig Brill (later Martin Schilling) and sold widely in both Europe and the U.S. Surfaces representing the thermal properties of gases, liquids, and solids were more closely tied to the circulation of knowledge between Britain and the U.S. James Thomson designed such a surface. When American James Willard Gibbs circulated reprints of his ideas on thermodynamics, James Clerk Maxwell – by then at the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge – prepared a model of it. Several examples survive. In the early twentieth century, British-born modelmaker Richard P. Baker, who studied at the University of Chicago and then taught at the University of Iowa, designed a series of models of thermodynamic surfaces which carried on this tradition. His work was influenced by a German-born colleague in the physics department, Karl E. Guthre.

Author

• Peggy Aldrich Kidwell, Smithsonian