William John Macquorn Rankine

Born: 5 July 1820 in Edinburgh, Scotland

Died: 24 December 1872 in Glasgow, Scotland

He was in the first place a Scottish mechanical engineer and on second place civil engineer, physicist
and mathematician. He was a founding contributor, with Rudolf Clausius and William Thomson (Lord Kelvin),
to the science of thermodynamics, particularly focusing on the first of the three thermodynamic laws.

Rankine developed a complete theory of the steam engine and indeed of all heat engines. His manuals
of engineering science and practice were used for many decades after their publication in the 1850s and 1860s.
He published several hundred papers and notes on science and engineering topics, from 1840 onwards, and his
interests were extremely varied, including, in his youth, botany, music theory and number theory, and, in his
mature years, most major branches of science, mathematics and engineering. He was an enthusiastic amateur
singer, pianist and cellist who composed his own humorous songs. He was born in Edinburgh and died
in Glasgow, a bachelor.

Sadi Nicolas Lonard Carnot

Born: 1 June 1796 in Paris, France

Died: 24 August 1832 in Paris, France
He was a French military engineer and physicist, often described as the "father ofthermodynamics". In
his only publication, the 1824 monograph Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire, Carnot gave the first
successful theory of the maximum efficiency of heat engines. Carnot's work attracted little attention during his
lifetime, but it was later used by Rudolf Clausius and Lord Kelvin to formalize the second law of
thermodynamics and define the concept of entropy.
 Nikolaus Otto

Born: 10 June 1832, Holzhausen an der Haide, Nassau

Died: 26 January 1891, Cologne
He was the German engineer of the first internal-combustion engineto efficiently burn fuel directly in
a piston chamber. Though the concept of four strokes, with the vital compression of the mixture before
ignition, had been invented and patented in 1861 by Alphonse Beau de Rochas, Otto was the first to make it
practical.

Rudolf Christian Diesel

Born: 18 March 1858

Died: 29 September 1913
He was a German inventor and mechanical engineer, famous for the invention of the diesel engine and
his mysterious death. Diesel was the subject of the 1942 film Diesel. Diesel understood thermodynamics and
the theoretical and practical constraints on fuel efficiency. He knew that as much as 90% of the energy
available in the fuel is wasted in a steam engine. His work in engine design was driven by the goal of much
higher efficiency ratios. After experimenting with a Carnot Cycle engine, he developed his own approach.
Eventually, he obtained a patent for his design for a compression-ignition engine. In his engine, fuel was
injected at the end of compression and the fuel was ignited by the high temperature resulting from
compression.

Robert Stirling

Born: 25 October 1790

Died: 6 June 1878
He was a Scottish clergyman, and inventor of the Stirling engine. He invented what he called the Heat
Economiser (now generally known as the regenerator), a device for improving the thermal/fuel efficiency of a
variety of industrial processes, obtaining a patent for the economiser and an engine incorporating it in 1816. In
1818 he built the first practical version of his engine, used to pump water from a quarry.

John Ericsson

Born: July 31, 1803 Lngbanshyttan, Vrmland

Died: March 8, 1889 New York

He was a Swedish-American inventor, active in England and the United States, and
regarded as one of the most influential mechanical engineers ever.

Ericsson collaborated on the design of the steam locomotive Novelty, which competed in
the Rainhill Trials on the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, won by George Stephenson's Rocket.
In America he designed the US Navy's first screw-propelled steam-frigate USS Princeton, in
partnership with Captain Robert Stockton, who unjustly blamed him for the fatal accident at its speed
trials. A new partnership with Cornelius H. DeLamater of the DeLamater Iron Works in New York
resulted in the first armoured ship with a rotating turret, the USS Monitor, which dramatically saved
the US naval blockading squadron from destruction by an ironclad Confederate vessel,CSS Virginia,
at Hampton Roads in March 1862.

James Prescott Joule

Born: 24 December 1818 Salford, Lancashire, England, UK

Died: March 8, 1889 New York
He was an English physicist and brewer, born in Salford, Lancashire. Joule studied the nature
of heat, and discovered its relationship to mechanical work (see energy). This led to the law of
conservation of energy, which led to the development of the first law of thermodynamics. The SI derived
unit of energy, the joule, is named after James Joule. He worked with Lord Kelvin to develop the absolute
scale of temperature the kelvin. Joule also made observations of magnetostriction, and he found the
relationship between the current through a resistor and the heat dissipated, which is now called Joule's
first law.
 George Brayton

Born: October 3, 1830

Died: December 17, 1892
He was born in Rhode Island, son of William H. and Minerva (Bailey) Brayton. He was
an American mechanical engineerwho lived with his family in Boston and who is noted for introducing the
constant pressure engine that is the basis for the gas turbine, and which is now referred to as the Brayton cycle.
Brayton cycle engines were some of the first engines to be used for motive power.

Albert Einstein

Born: 14 March 1879

Died: 18 April 1955

He was a German-born theoretical physicist who developed the general theory of

relativity, one of the two pillars of modern physics (alongside quantum mechanics).

He received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921, but not

for relativity. His theories of special and general relativity are of great importance to
many branches ofphysics and astronomy. They have been given experimental confirmation by
many experiments and observations.

Einstein is well known for his theories about light, matter, gravity, space, and time. His most well
known equation is . It means that energy and mass are different forms of the same
thing.

Einstein published more than 300 scientific papers and over 150 non-scientific works. He
received honorary doctorate degrees in science, medicine and philosophy from many European
and American universities.
 Isaac Newton

Born: 25 December 1642

Died: 20 March 1726/7

He was an English physicist and mathematician. He is famous for his work on the laws
of motion,optics, gravity, and calculus. In 1687, Newton published a book called the Philosophiae
Naturalis Principia Mathematica in which he presents his theory of universal gravitation and three laws
of motion.

Newton built the first practical reflecting telescope in 1668; he also developed a theory of light
based on the observation that a prism decomposes white light into the colours of the rainbow. Newton
also shares credit with Gottfried Leibniz for the development of calculus.

Newton's ideas on light, motion, and gravity dominated physics for the next three centuries, until
modified by Albert Einstein's theory of relativity.

References: https://en.wikipedia.org