J.R. Partington (1913)

A Text-Book of Thermodynamics (with special reference to Chemistry) by James Riddick Partington, originally published by the D. Van Nostrand Company in 1913. This new, print-on-demand copy from Hardpress.net was purchased from a leading online bookseller.

JR Partington (1886 – 1965) was a British chemist who worked with the thermodynamicist Walter Nernst for several years in Berlin, where they studied the specific heats of gases. In 1913 Partington returned to Britain to lecture on chemistry at the University of Manchester. This book dates from that time. You can read more about Partington here, and see the book online at archive.org here.

James Riddick Partington (1886-1965)

Partington’s book offers a fascinating snapshot of the science as it was immediately before the Great War; in terms of approach it shares more the approach of Planck’s Treatise of 1897 than the kind of book that Lewis and Randall were to write in 1923.

For the science historian, this book offers a rich resource worthy of study. There is a considerable amount of ‘forgotten’ thermodynamics to rediscover – such as Massieu’s theorems describing the free energy functions which actually pre-empt the work of Gibbs, and the forgotten electrochemical origins of the Gibbs-Helmholtz equations.

A typical page of the 544-page book, which is arranged in 18 chapters