ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the historical development of temperature and thermodynamics. Beginning with a review of philosophical thoughts on measurement, the chapter then surveys pre-temperature methods of thermal observation into the deep past—from combustion to clothing to architecture to metallurgy. It was not until the seventeenth century that numbers were placed beside the expansion of liquid to quantify thermal behavior. This concern with quantification in the seventeenth century echoes shifts toward numeracy across many spheres of early-modern Europe. By the early nineteenth century, with the arrival of the steam engine, increasing effort was dedicated to exploiting the relationship between heat and motion. Laws of nature (the first and second law of thermodynamics) were developed by studying the engine. Hardly “natural,” the steam engine is a machine designed to more rapidly transform the world into future wealth (commodities). This history is capped with an examination of some of the most extreme temperatures observed and created through the twenty-first century.
