Understanding Power. A 'Law and Economics' Approach

A professional strong man could do the same for a thousand pounds. Nevertheless, the energy expended in lifting one pound one foot is equal to 13,558,200 ergs. Obviously, if any trifling bit of work is going to involve ergs in the tens of millions, we need other and larger units to keep the nu merical values conveniently low. For instance, there is an energy unit called a joule, which is equal to 10,000,000 ergs. This unit is derived from the name of the British physi cist James Prescott Joule, who inherited wealth and a brew ery but spent his time in research. From 1840 to 18 9 e ran a series of meticulous experiments which demonstrated conclusively the quantitative interconversion of heat and work and brought physics an understanding of the law of conservation of energy. However, it was the erman sci entist Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz who first put the law into actual words in a paper presented in 1847, so that he consequently gets formal credit for -,the discov ery. (The word "joule," by the way, is most commonly pro nounced "jowl," although Joule himself probably pro 167 nounced his name "jool." In any case, I have heard over precise people pronounce the word "zhool" under the im pression that it is a French word, which it isn't ...»