The term latent heat was coined by Joseph Black in
1762. The well-known scientist-engineer, James Watt, precisely determined its
value of water by experiments 250 ago, with an accuracy that is comparable to
our modern experiments. However, Rudolf Clausius, one of the founders of modern
thermodynamics, stated in 1850 that this quantity
not only is hidden (latent) but does even not exist. In this paper, we
present Black’s model of latent heat, describe Watt’s experiments and shed some
light on the motivation behind Clausius’s statement.
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