Even as a young child, Mayer showed an intense interest with various mechanical mechanisms. He was a young man who performed various experiments of the physical and chemical variety. In fact, one of his favorite hobbies was creating various types of electrical devices and air pumps. It was obvious that he was intelligent. Hence, Mayer attended Eberhard-Karls University in May 1832. He studied medicine during his time there. In 1837, he and some of his friends were arrested for wearing the
couleurs of a forbidden organization. The consequences for this arrest included a one year expulsion from the college and a brief period of incarceration. This diversion sent Mayer traveling to Switzerland, France, and the
Dutch East Indies. Mayer drew some additional interest in mathematics and engineering from his friend Carl Baur through private tutoring. In 1841, Mayer returned to Heilbronn to practice medicine, but physics became his new passion. In June 1841 he completed his first scientific paper entitled "On the Quantitative and Qualitative Determination of Forces". It was largely ignored by other professionals in the area. Then, Mayer became interested in the area of heat and its motion. He presented a value in numerical terms for the mechanical equivalent of heat. He also was the first person to describe the vital chemical process now referred to as oxidation as the primary source of energy for any living creature. In 1848 he calculated that in the absence of a source of energy the Sun would cool down in only 5000 years, and he suggested that the impact of meteorites kept it hot. Since he was not taken seriously at the time, his achievements were overlooked and credit was given to
James Joule. Mayer almost committed suicide after he discovered this fact. He spent some time in mental institutions to recover from this and the loss of some of his children. Several of his papers were published due to the advanced nature of the physics and chemistry. He was awarded an honorary doctorate in 1859 by the philosophical faculty at the
University of Tübingen. His overlooked work was revived in 1862 by fellow physicist
John Tyndall in a lecture at the London Royal Institution. In July 1867 Mayer published "Die Mechanik der Wärme." This publication dealt with the mechanics of heat and its motion. On 5 November 1867 Mayer was awarded personal nobility by the
Kingdom of Württemberg (von Mayer) which is the German equivalent of a British knighthood. von Mayer died in Germany in 1878. After Sadi Carnot stated it for caloric, Mayer was the first person to state the law of the conservation of energy, one of the most fundamental tenets of modern day physics. The law of the conservation of energy states that the total mechanical energy of a system remains constant in any isolated system of objects that interact with each other only by way of forces that are
conservative. Mayer's first attempt at stating the conservation of energy was a paper he sent to
Johann Christian Poggendorff's
Annalen der Physik, in which he postulated a conservation of force (
Erhaltungssatz der Kraft). However, owing to Mayer's lack of advanced training in
physics, it contained some fundamental mistakes and was not published. Mayer continued to pursue the idea steadfastly and argued with the
Tübingen physics professor
Johann Gottlieb Nörremberg, who rejected his
hypothesis. Nörremberg did, however, give Mayer a number of valuable suggestions on how the idea could be examined experimentally; for example, if
kinetic energy transforms into heat energy, water should be warmed by
vibration. Mayer not only performed this demonstration, but determined also the quantitative factor of the transformation, calculating the mechanical equivalent of heat. The result of his investigations was published 1842 in the May edition of
Justus von Liebig's
Annalen der Chemie und Pharmacie. It was translated as
Remarks on the Forces of Inorganic Nature In his booklet
Die organische Bewegung im Zusammenhang mit dem Stoffwechsel (
The Organic Movement in Connection with the Metabolism, 1845) he specified the numerical value of the mechanical equivalent of heat: at first as 365
kgf·m/kcal, later as 425 kgf·m/kcal; the modern values are 4.184
kJ/kcal (426.6 kgf·m/kcal) for the thermochemical calorie and 4.1868 kJ/kcal (426.9 kgf·m/kcal) for the international steam table calorie. This relation implies that, although work and heat are different forms of energy, they can be transformed into one another. This law is now called the
first law of thermodynamics, and led to the formulation of the general principle of
conservation of energy, definitively stated by
Hermann von Helmholtz in 1847.
Mayer's relation Mayer derived a relation between specific heat at constant pressure and the specific heat at constant volume for an ideal gas. The relation is: C_{P,m} - C_{V,m} = R, where
CP,m is the
molar specific heat at constant
pressure,
CV,m is the molar specific heat at constant
volume and
R is the
gas constant. == Later life ==