Ludwig A. Colding
Encyclopedia
Ludwig August Colding was a Danish
civil engineer
and physicist
who articulated the principle of conservation of energy
contemporaneouly with, and independently of, James Prescott Joule
and Julius Robert von Mayer
though his contribution was largely overlooked and neglected.
, Denmark
, his father, Andreas Christian, had been an officer
in the Danish privateer
service. Ludwig's mother, Anna Sophie, was the daughter of a clergyman and imbued the household with a deeply religious sentiment. Around the time of Ludwig's birth, his father retired from seafaring and took up a position as a farm manager. He seems to have been particularly unsuited to such a profession and this, together with the upheavals of the Napoleonic Wars in Denmark, subjected the young Ludwig to a rather irregular childhood and schooling.
Hans Christian Ørsted
was an old family friend and arranged for Colding to serve an apprenticeship
under a craftsman
in Copenhagen
, Colding achieving the status of journeyman
in 1836. Ørsted had, by this stage, become something of a mentor to the young Colding and encouraged him to enroll at the Copenhagen Polytechnic Institute
. The Institute had been founded at Ørsted's initiative and he offered continual advice and support to the young Colding.
Colding graduated in 1841 and worked as a teacher before being appointed inspector of roads and bridges in Copenhagen in 1845. Colding's importance and influence grew until he was appointed state engineer for Copenhagen in 1857. He oversaw a vast range of public housing
, transport
, lighting
and sanitation
projects and gained a high reputation throughout Denmark and internationally. He retired from professional engineering in 1886.
, hydrology
, oceanography
and meteorology
as well as electromagnetism
and thermodynamics
. He was largely responsible for founding the Danish Meteorological Institute
in 1872. However, he is best remembered for what he himself termed the "principle of imperishability of the forces of nature." Colding was influenced by D'Alembert's principle
of "lost forces", Ørsted, the Naturphilosophie
to which Ørsted subscribed and his own religious upbringing..
Colding first fulfilled his ambition to work alongside Ørsted, who was conducting experiments on the compressibility of water, in 1839. He summarised this work with a review of other data on compression and friction
of various materials in his first published scientific paper.. In this work, he went on to state that "the quantities of heat evolved are, in every case, proportional to the lost moving forces" though he did not calculate a mechanical equivalent of heat
as Joule was to do in the same year.
With Ørsted's support, a further series of quantitative experiments was sponsored by the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters
, culminating in a report in 1847. By 1850, Colding had obtained a value for the mechanical equivalent of heat, some 14% lower than the modern value
(4.1860 J
·cal
-1) at a time when Joule had measured 4.159 J·cal-1.. A subsequent calculation by Colding in 1852 yielded a value only 3% below modern values.
Denmark
Denmark is a Scandinavian country in Northern Europe. The countries of Denmark and Greenland, as well as the Faroe Islands, constitute the Kingdom of Denmark . It is the southernmost of the Nordic countries, southwest of Sweden and south of Norway, and bordered to the south by Germany. Denmark...
civil engineer
Civil engineer
A civil engineer is a person who practices civil engineering; the application of planning, designing, constructing, maintaining, and operating infrastructures while protecting the public and environmental health, as well as improving existing infrastructures that have been neglected.Originally, a...
and physicist
Physicist
A physicist is a scientist who studies or practices physics. Physicists study a wide range of physical phenomena in many branches of physics spanning all length scales: from sub-atomic particles of which all ordinary matter is made to the behavior of the material Universe as a whole...
who articulated the principle of conservation of energy
Conservation of energy
The nineteenth century law of conservation of energy is a law of physics. It states that the total amount of energy in an isolated system remains constant over time. The total energy is said to be conserved over time...
contemporaneouly with, and independently of, James Prescott Joule
James Prescott Joule
James Prescott Joule FRS was an English physicist and brewer, born in Salford, Lancashire. Joule studied the nature of heat, and discovered its relationship to mechanical work . This led to the theory of conservation of energy, which led to the development of the first law of thermodynamics. The...
and Julius Robert von Mayer
Julius Robert von Mayer
Julius Robert von Mayer was a German physician and physicist and one of the founders of thermodynamics...
though his contribution was largely overlooked and neglected.
Life
Born in HolbækHolbæk
Holbæk is a town in Denmark and the seat of Holbæk municipality with a population of 27,055 . The city is located in the northeastern part of Region Sjælland, Denmark....
, Denmark
Denmark
Denmark is a Scandinavian country in Northern Europe. The countries of Denmark and Greenland, as well as the Faroe Islands, constitute the Kingdom of Denmark . It is the southernmost of the Nordic countries, southwest of Sweden and south of Norway, and bordered to the south by Germany. Denmark...
, his father, Andreas Christian, had been an officer
Officer (armed forces)
An officer is a member of an armed force or uniformed service who holds a position of authority. Commissioned officers derive authority directly from a sovereign power and, as such, hold a commission charging them with the duties and responsibilities of a specific office or position...
in the Danish privateer
Privateer
A privateer is a private person or ship authorized by a government by letters of marque to attack foreign shipping during wartime. Privateering was a way of mobilizing armed ships and sailors without having to spend public money or commit naval officers...
service. Ludwig's mother, Anna Sophie, was the daughter of a clergyman and imbued the household with a deeply religious sentiment. Around the time of Ludwig's birth, his father retired from seafaring and took up a position as a farm manager. He seems to have been particularly unsuited to such a profession and this, together with the upheavals of the Napoleonic Wars in Denmark, subjected the young Ludwig to a rather irregular childhood and schooling.
Hans Christian Ørsted
Hans Christian Ørsted
Hans Christian Ørsted was a Danish physicist and chemist who discovered that electric currents create magnetic fields, an important aspect of electromagnetism...
was an old family friend and arranged for Colding to serve an apprenticeship
Apprenticeship
Apprenticeship is a system of training a new generation of practitioners of a skill. Apprentices or protégés build their careers from apprenticeships...
under a craftsman
Artisan
An artisan is a skilled manual worker who makes items that may be functional or strictly decorative, including furniture, clothing, jewellery, household items, and tools...
in Copenhagen
Copenhagen
Copenhagen is the capital and largest city of Denmark, with an urban population of 1,199,224 and a metropolitan population of 1,930,260 . With the completion of the transnational Øresund Bridge in 2000, Copenhagen has become the centre of the increasingly integrating Øresund Region...
, Colding achieving the status of journeyman
Journeyman
A journeyman is someone who completed an apprenticeship and was fully educated in a trade or craft, but not yet a master. To become a master, a journeyman had to submit a master work piece to a guild for evaluation and be admitted to the guild as a master....
in 1836. Ørsted had, by this stage, become something of a mentor to the young Colding and encouraged him to enroll at the Copenhagen Polytechnic Institute
Technical University of Denmark
The Technical University of Denmark , often simply referred to as DTU, is a university just north of Copenhagen, Denmark. It was founded in 1829 at the initiative of Hans Christian Ørsted as Denmark's first polytechnic, and is today ranked among Europe's leading engineering institutions, and the...
. The Institute had been founded at Ørsted's initiative and he offered continual advice and support to the young Colding.
Colding graduated in 1841 and worked as a teacher before being appointed inspector of roads and bridges in Copenhagen in 1845. Colding's importance and influence grew until he was appointed state engineer for Copenhagen in 1857. He oversaw a vast range of public housing
Public housing
Public housing is a form of housing tenure in which the property is owned by a government authority, which may be central or local. Social housing is an umbrella term referring to rental housing which may be owned and managed by the state, by non-profit organizations, or by a combination of the...
, transport
Transport
Transport or transportation is the movement of people, cattle, animals and goods from one location to another. Modes of transport include air, rail, road, water, cable, pipeline, and space. The field can be divided into infrastructure, vehicles, and operations...
, lighting
Lighting
Lighting or illumination is the deliberate application of light to achieve some practical or aesthetic effect. Lighting includes the use of both artificial light sources such as lamps and light fixtures, as well as natural illumination by capturing daylight...
and sanitation
Sanitation
Sanitation is the hygienic means of promoting health through prevention of human contact with the hazards of wastes. Hazards can be either physical, microbiological, biological or chemical agents of disease. Wastes that can cause health problems are human and animal feces, solid wastes, domestic...
projects and gained a high reputation throughout Denmark and internationally. He retired from professional engineering in 1886.
Scientific work
Colding found time for private scientific work in fluid mechanicsFluid mechanics
Fluid mechanics is the study of fluids and the forces on them. Fluid mechanics can be divided into fluid statics, the study of fluids at rest; fluid kinematics, the study of fluids in motion; and fluid dynamics, the study of the effect of forces on fluid motion...
, hydrology
Hydrology
Hydrology is the study of the movement, distribution, and quality of water on Earth and other planets, including the hydrologic cycle, water resources and environmental watershed sustainability...
, oceanography
Oceanography
Oceanography , also called oceanology or marine science, is the branch of Earth science that studies the ocean...
and meteorology
Meteorology
Meteorology is the interdisciplinary scientific study of the atmosphere. Studies in the field stretch back millennia, though significant progress in meteorology did not occur until the 18th century. The 19th century saw breakthroughs occur after observing networks developed across several countries...
as well as electromagnetism
Electromagnetism
Electromagnetism is one of the four fundamental interactions in nature. The other three are the strong interaction, the weak interaction and gravitation...
and thermodynamics
Thermodynamics
Thermodynamics is a physical science that studies the effects on material bodies, and on radiation in regions of space, of transfer of heat and of work done on or by the bodies or radiation...
. He was largely responsible for founding the Danish Meteorological Institute
Danish Meteorological Institute
The Danish Meteorological Institute is the official Danish meteorological institute, administrated by the Ministry of Transport and Energy. The institute makes weather forecasts and observations for Denmark, Greenland, and the Faroe Islands....
in 1872. However, he is best remembered for what he himself termed the "principle of imperishability of the forces of nature." Colding was influenced by D'Alembert's principle
D'Alembert's principle
D'Alembert's principle, also known as the Lagrange–d'Alembert principle, is a statement of the fundamental classical laws of motion. It is named after its discoverer, the French physicist and mathematician Jean le Rond d'Alembert...
of "lost forces", Ørsted, the Naturphilosophie
Naturphilosophie
Naturphilosophie is a term used in English-language philosophy to identify a current in the philosophical tradition of German idealism, as applied to the study of Nature in the earlier 19th century...
to which Ørsted subscribed and his own religious upbringing..
Colding first fulfilled his ambition to work alongside Ørsted, who was conducting experiments on the compressibility of water, in 1839. He summarised this work with a review of other data on compression and friction
Friction
Friction is the force resisting the relative motion of solid surfaces, fluid layers, and/or material elements sliding against each other. There are several types of friction:...
of various materials in his first published scientific paper.. In this work, he went on to state that "the quantities of heat evolved are, in every case, proportional to the lost moving forces" though he did not calculate a mechanical equivalent of heat
Mechanical equivalent of heat
In the history of science, the mechanical equivalent of heat was a concept that had an important part in the development and acceptance of the conservation of energy and the establishment of the science of thermodynamics in the 19th century....
as Joule was to do in the same year.
With Ørsted's support, a further series of quantitative experiments was sponsored by the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters
Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters
Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters is a Danish non-governmental science Academy, founded 13 November 1742 by permission of the King Christian VI, as a historical Collegium Antiquitatum...
, culminating in a report in 1847. By 1850, Colding had obtained a value for the mechanical equivalent of heat, some 14% lower than the modern value
Mechanical equivalent of heat
In the history of science, the mechanical equivalent of heat was a concept that had an important part in the development and acceptance of the conservation of energy and the establishment of the science of thermodynamics in the 19th century....
(4.1860 J
Joule
The joule ; symbol J) is a derived unit of energy or work in the International System of Units. It is equal to the energy expended in applying a force of one newton through a distance of one metre , or in passing an electric current of one ampere through a resistance of one ohm for one second...
·cal
Calorie
The calorie is a pre-SI metric unit of energy. It was first defined by Nicolas Clément in 1824 as a unit of heat, entering French and English dictionaries between 1841 and 1867. In most fields its use is archaic, having been replaced by the SI unit of energy, the joule...
-1) at a time when Joule had measured 4.159 J·cal-1.. A subsequent calculation by Colding in 1852 yielded a value only 3% below modern values.
Legacy
Colding's thermodynamic work was neglected both in his native Denmark and internationally though, from an historical perspective, he seems to deserve no less credit in the development of the concept of energy than Joule or Mayer. However, his contributions to meteorology and the built environment of Copenhagen are notable in themselves.Honours
- Elected a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of SciencesRoyal Swedish Academy of SciencesThe Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences or Kungliga Vetenskapsakademien is one of the Royal Academies of Sweden. The Academy is an independent, non-governmental scientific organization which acts to promote the sciences, primarily the natural sciences and mathematics.The Academy was founded on 2...
in 1875. - Cross of Honour of the Order of the DannebrogOrder of the DannebrogThe Order of the Dannebrog is an Order of Denmark, instituted in 1671 by Christian V. It resulted from a move in 1660 to break the absolutism of the nobility. The Order was only to comprise 50 noble Knights in one class plus the Master of the Order, i.e. the Danish monarch, and his sons...
, (1886)