As noted in a previous post, I’ve started translating a collection of correspondence of the amazing German physician Julius Robert Mayer, who around 1840 traveled to Indonesia as a ship’s doctor and along the way discovered and elucidated, for the first time, the principle of conservation of energy.

I thought I’d share a brief snippet of one recent letter I translated, written to his friend Paul Friedrich Lang. This is the first mention I’ve found of Mayer’s discovery in his letters; the discovery was made around 1840 and he first published his work in 1842. This letter comes from March of 1844, and this brief description made me chuckle:

You see that there is still something of the mathematician in my way of thinking; and in fact I am constantly trying to devote all the time I have to an attempt to gain a mathematically clear understanding of natural phenomena, whereby my horizons are broadened even further and I arrive at real results, which it would be far too boring to even mention here.

It is really quite funny that Mayer says that his results would be “far too boring to even mention here,” considering he is referring to work on conservation of energy, which is a transformative concept that literally touches every aspect of physics!

At this point, I suspect Mayer was already engaged in controversy about priority of discovery, as his paper appeared in 1842 and Joule’s work on the same topic appeared in 1843; this brief snippet says little about the storm of controversy that would soon erupt.

Anyway, more later!