Chemical Education Today
Letters H Is for Enthalpy
The author replies
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:
I appreciate the interest of Hendrick Van Ness in pursuing the origin of the word enthalpy, in pointing out an alternative source of the 1909 J. P. Dalton paper in which that word occurs, and in noting Kamerlingh Onnes’ contribution to the 1908 congress on refrigeration. I also thank J. Chem. Educ. for fostering such exchange of information.
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.)
Irmgard K. Howard Department of Chemistry Houghton College One Willard Avenue Houghton, NY 14744-0128
[email protected] 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 1. Howard, I. K. J. Chem. Educ. 2002, 79, 697–698. 2. Smith, J. M., Van Ness, H. C., and Abbott, M. M. Introduction to Chemical Engineering Thermodynamics, 6th ed; McGrawHill: Boston, MA, 2001. Hendrick C. Van Ness Department of Chemical Engineering Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Troy, NY 12180-3590
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Journal of Chemical Education • Vol. 80 No. 5 May 2003 • JChemEd.chem.wisc.edu
