ASHRAE Journal - June 2024 - 41

FEATURE
fl ed to St Omer, near Calais, to take refuge with her
family. Although Napoleon played an active part in
the 18 Fructidor coup, he made a further power grab
on 18 Brumaire Year VIII (November 9, 1799) when he
abolished the Directory and set up the French Consulate,
appointing himself as First Consul. He quickly moved to
bring Lazare Carnot back from exile and appointed him
Minister of War in April 1800.
This brought the young Sadi Carnot into contact
with Napoleon and his entourage. A story is told of
one encounter, when Sadi was four years old and had
gone with his father to a meeting at Napoleon's home,
the Chateau de Malmaison, 10 miles (16 km) west of
Paris. During these meetings, Sadi was looked after by
Napoleon's wife, Joséphine de Beauharnais. One day
Joséphine and some other ladies were rowing a boat on
a pond in the garden when Napoleon
appeared and teased them by tossing
stones to splash them. Sadi stepped in
front of him and said " Beast of a First
Consul, will you stop tormenting those
ladies! " Fortunately, the " Beast " saw
the humor in this heroic gesture and
laughed, allowing the others, who had
been too afraid to protest, to join the
hilarity. On another visit to Malmaison,
Sadi went missing and was fi nally found
in a water mill, quizzing the miller about
how the mechanism worked.
This interest in mechanics and physics
encouraged his father to steer Sadi toward a scientifi c
education, engaging a tutor for him at the Charlemagne
Lycée before he enrolled at the École Polytechnique
in 1812. The Polytechnique, which was founded by
mathematician Gaspard Monge with support from
Lazare Carnot, was converted to a military academy in
1804 on the order of Napoleon to develop the technical
skills of the French army offi cers. Carnot was a pupil
there for two years, excelling in military and geometric
studies, but his education was disrupted by various
military campaigns at home and abroad.
Napoleon's disastrous Russian campaign,
immortalized by Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture, reversed
the Emperor's fortunes and resulted in various uprisings
in France, culminating in the restoration of the
monarchy under Louis XVIII in May 1814. The students
of the École Polytechnique were mobilized to defend the
ROYAL FRIENDS Sadi's babysitter and wife of
Napoleon, Joséphine de Beauharnais.
Château de Vincennes, under the command of General
Pierre Daumesnil. Daumesnil had a wooden leg, having
lost his limb at the Battle of Wagram in Austria in 1809.
When the chateau was besieged, Daumesnil declared
" I shall surrender Vincennes when I get my leg back. "
However, he eventually succumbed to the overwhelming
forces of the royalists.
After the fall of Paris in April 1814, Napoleon abdicated
and was exiled to the Mediterranean island of Elba,
but he escaped and returned to France to regain power
in March 1815. He gathered a force to repel France's
enemies and met the coalition army of Britain, Austria,
Prussia and Russia at Waterloo in Belgium, where he
was fi nally defeated. He abdicated for the second time
on June 24 and was exiled to St. Helena in the middle
of the South Atlantic where he died in 1821. Lieutenant
Sadi Carnot, aged 18, was drafted into
the Napoleonic army Corps of Engineers
early in 1815, but after the French defeat
his father again fell from grace and went
into exile, this time in Warsaw, Poland,
and then Magdeburg, Germany, where
he died in 1823.
Sadi's career as a soldier-engineer
stalled. He noted that the offi cers who
had paid their respects to the son of the
Minister of the Interior in May 1815 no
longer wanted to know him by August.
He had a succession of dead-end
postings counting bricks, repairing walls
and drawing plans that were only ever fi led, never
fulfi lled. In 1819, he transferred to the General Staff in
Paris, affording him the time to pick up his scientifi c
studies again.
He befriended two chemists, Nicolas Clément and
Charles-Bernard Desormes, both about twenty years
older than Carnot. At that time they were working
on a method to determine the ratio of specifi c heats,
known as the adiabatic index or Laplace Coeffi cient.
The Clément - Desormes experiment was rough but
gave a fi gure for the coeffi cient within 4% of the true
value. Together they investigated several chemical
phenomena including carbon monoxide, sulphuric
acid and iodine. Clément was also responsible
for defi ning the calorie as a unit of heat and had
worked on the calorifi c value of coal, the mechanical
equivalent of heat, the application of steam power
J U N E 2 0 2 4 ashrae.org ASHRAE JOURNAL
41
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