William Thomson, later Lord Kelvin, distinguished the mechanical equivalence of heat from restrictions on cyclic conversion of heat into work. Conservation of energy alone gives for a heat engine, but does not determine how small the rejected heat can be. His 1851 treatment revised the caloric reading of Carnot's theorem while retaining a universal limit on reversible engines. In modern absolute-temperature notation, the reversible bound is .[ref]
Dynamical theory of heat by William Thomson. Sections 1–14, heat/work equivalence and cyclic-engine restrictions; modern temperature notation
A physicist whose thermodynamics distinguished conservation of energy from restrictions on cyclic heat-to-work conversion.
William Thomson, Lord Kelvin; photograph credited to Messrs. Dickinson, London; Smithsonian Libraries, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain
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William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin (1824–1907), was a prominent British mathematical physicist and engineer best known for his work in thermodynamics and electricity. He was born in Belfast, Ireland, and received his education at the University of Glasgow and later at Cambridge University. Thomson is most famously associated with the development of the absolute temperature scale, now known as the Kelvin scale, which is crucial in the fields of thermodynamics and physics.