When the circuit was engaged, a rise in the water temperature could be measured. The experiment consisted of a wire submerged in water and connected to the terminals of a battery. This led him to conduct a series of experiments on the production, transfer, and use of energy and mechanical work that ultimately led to the first law of thermodynamics (the SI unit of energy was named Joule in his honor)\(^1\).Īmong those experiments was the study of the relation between the electrical current that flows through a conductor and the rise in its temperature. As a manager in his family’s brewery, Joule set to investigate if the then recently invented electrical motor could be more efficient than the steam engines in use at the process, in terms of cost (it turned out they weren’t, electrical energy had to be produced from zinc batteries). The heating effect was first studied and characterized by the then-to-be-famous amateur scientist James Prescott Joule, around the year 1840. One can see Joule heating as a transformation between “electrical energy” and “thermal energy”, following the energy conservation principle. ![]() ![]() This thermal energy is then evidenced through a rise in the conductor material temperature, thus the term “heating”. Joule heating is the physical effect by which the pass of current through an electrical conductor produces thermal energy.
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