Sadi Carnot (1796-1832), French physicist and military engineer. Carnot served in the French military until Napoleon’s defeat in 1815, when his father, the famed Lazare Carnot went into exile and young Sadi obtained permanent leave. It was around this time that everyone was getting super pumped about steam engines, but despite their enthusiasm, 1800’s folk didn’t really have any idea what was up with the engines or how the physics of heat actually worked.

Carnot was quick to remedy this with his tour de force, Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire, which is a pretty fittingly bamf name. The book introduced the Carnot Cycle, the ideal thermodynamic cycle for converting thermal energy to work or vice versa, and even laid down the basis for the second law of thermodynamics.

Unfortunately, nobody understood what a boyishly good looking physics god poor Sadi was, and no one paid his book much mind until Émile Clapeyron spiced the work up in the 1830s, by which time Carnot had died of cholera.

I couldn’t decide which picture I liked better, so both. Yes.