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For some years, off and on, I have, like Irmgard K. Howard, tried to
trace the origin of the word enthalpy (1).
We have uncovered the same references and have come to the same
conclusions. My interest in this topic is as coauthor of
Introduction to Chemical Engineering
Thermodynamics, 6th ed. (2).
As a result of my search I included in this 6th edition (p 38, where
the word is introduced) the following footnote: A
word proposed by H. Kamerlingh Onnes, Dutch physicist who first
liquefied helium in 1908, discovered superconductivity in 1911, and won
the Nobel Prize for physics in 1913. (See: Communications from the
Physical Laboratory of the University of Leiden, No. 109, page
3, footnote 2, 1909.) This is an alternative
source of the paper by J. P. Dalton cited by Howard in her reference
13. Kamerlingh Onnes seems never to have used the word in any
publication. A message from the Kamerlingh Onnes Laboratory at Leiden
suggests that he likely proposed the word orally at the first meeting
of the Institute of Refrigeration in Paris, 1908. However, nothing
appears in the proceedings of that congress: Comptes rendus du
Congres international du froid, 1908. (In a short paper
he did propose the “Carnot” as the unit of entropy.)
The word in Dutch is pronounced with the accent on the second syllable
(en-THAL-py), and I strongly advocate this pronunciation in English, so
as to distinguish it clearly from EN-tro-py. Unfortunately, most
chemists accent the first syllable, and students so imprinted seem
unable to change.
Literature Cited
- Howard, I. K. J. Chem. Educ. 2002, 79, 697–698.
- Smith, J. M., Van Ness, H. C., and Abbott, M. M. Introduction to Chemical Engineering
Thermodynamics, 6th ed; McGraw-Hill: Boston, MA, 2001.
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