"Heat up to that time [early nineteenth century] and indeed much later, was regarded as an imponderable substance, caloric; as a thing which was absorbed by bodies when they were warmed, and was given out as they cooled; and which, moreover, was capable of entering into a sort of chemical combination with them, and so becoming latent. Rumford and Davy had given a great blow to this view of heat by proving that the quantity of heat which two portions of the same body could be made to give out, by rubbing them together, was practically illimitable. This result brought philosophers face to face with the contradiction of supposing that a finite body contain an infinite quantity of another body..."
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The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century
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