ABSTRACT
The core problems of the theories of heat in the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth century were the following: the cause of the rise and fall in the temperature of bodies; the cause of the expansion of gases when heated; the change of state; and the cause of the release of heat in several chemical interactions, and especially in combustion. It was in this problem-nexus that scientists such as Joseph Black, Antoine Lavoisier and Pierre-Simon Laplace introduced the causal-explanatory model of caloric.
