Conservation and Innovation : Helmholtz's Struggle with Energy ...

It seems as though the importance of the different approaches disappeared for
Helmholtz:
"...several heads .... generated exactly the same series of reflections" 311.
Helmholtz asserts he played only the following role:
"I myself, without being acquainted with either Mayer or Colding, and
having first made acquaintance with Joule's experiments at the end of my
investigation 312, followed the same path. I endeavoured to ascertain all the
relations between the different natural processes, which followed from our
regarding them from the above point of view." 313
From this analysis Helmholtz's specific interpretation of energy
conservation completely disappears. This cannot be attributed to a simplification
due to the attempt at popularizing a difficult subject. The reduction of all the
interactions of natural "forces" to only two kinds of energy and to one only, well
known, model of force would have simplified the task. This approach is, in my
opinion, motivated by the desire to offer to the public a picture of the new theory
which was not controversial for the specialists; it is the first implicit
acknowledgement of a weakness in Helmholtz's position of 1847 and the
beginning of a retreat to safer ground.
The subsequent steps of the argument recall: the recognition that work,
apart from not being created, cannot be destroyed; the mechanical theory of heat;
and the success in determining the work-heat equivalent. Again Helmholtz's own
results are expressed in simplified terms :
of Force to Organic Nature." In Proc Roy Inst 3(1861): 347-57; rep. inW A 3, pp.565-80, at
p.573); in 1862-4 (see: "On the Conservation of Force." In Pop Lect 1873, p.320); in a letter
to Tait, published in Tait's Sketch of Thermodynamics in1868; in 1882 in an appendix to the
reprint of the Erhaltung : WA 1 Pp.71-4. But in 1883, after the controversy with Dühring, its
judgement on Mayer's contribution was much less appreciative. See below.
310 On Colding see: Dahl, Per. "Ludwig A. Colding and the Conservation of Energy."
In Centaurus 8 (1963): 174-88.
311 Helmholtz "Interaction" p.499
312 I am inclined to think that this is true in view of the lack of reference to Joule in
the 1847 "Bericht" and of the little room dedicated to Joule in the fourth chapter of the
Erhaltung compared with Clapeyron and Holtzmann, surely less relevant to the problem of
the heat-work equivalent.
313 Helmholtz "Interaction" p.499