Person: Clapeyron, Benoit Paul Émile
Émile Clapeyron was a French engineer who designed steam locomotives and worked on the theory of heat.
Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):
- Clapeyron and Lamé went together to Russia in 1820.
- Clapeyron and Lamé went to St Petersburg where the École des Travaux Publics had been set up and these they taught both pure and applied mathematics.
- Both Clapeyron and Lamé remained in Russia for 10 years.
- Clapeyron proposed a railway line from Paris to St Germain and sought funding for the project.
- In 1835 the construction of the line from Paris to St Germain was authorised and Clapeyron and Lamé were put in charge of the project.
- Lamé was offered the chair of physics at the École Polytechnique shortly after they began their work and Clapeyron was left to head the venture.
- In 1836 Clapeyron, who specialised in designing steam locomotives, went to England to arrange for the building of some specialist locomotives.
- Clapeyron approached Stevenson, the most famous of the builders of locomotives, but Stevenson found Clapeyron's designs too difficult and declined the contract.
- Clapeyron then approached Sharp, Roberts, and Company, a firm which made railway locomotives in one of the earliest applications of the use of interchangeable parts.
- Continuing with his project on his return to France, Clapeyron extended his activities to the design of metal bridges.
- In 1844 Clapeyron was appointed professor at the École des Ponts et Chaussées then, in 1848, he was elected to the Paris Academy of Sciences.
- Clapeyron expressed Sadi Carnot's ideas on heat analytically, with the help of graphical representations, in 1834.
- Sadi Carnot's work was virtually unknown before Clapeyron's paper in which the Carnot cycle is given in mathematical formulation.
- This work of Clapeyron had important influences on Thomson and Clausius when its importance for the second law of thermodynamics became apparent.
- The Clapeyron relation, a differential equation which determines the heat of vaporisation of a liquid, is named after him.
Born 26 January 1799, Paris, France. Died 28 January 1864, Paris, France.
View full biography at MacTutor
Thank you to the contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0! 
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- non-Github:
- @J-J-O'Connor
- @E-F-Robertson
References
Adapted from other CC BY-SA 4.0 Sources:
- O’Connor, John J; Robertson, Edmund F: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive
