Drawing upon the engineering theory of Lazare and Sadi Carnot, and Émile Clapeyron; the experimentation of James Prescott Joule on the interchangeability of mechanical, chemical, thermal, and electrical forms of work; and his own Cambridge mathematical tripos training in mathematical analysis; the Glasgow physicist William Thomson and his circle of associates established a new mathematical physics relating to the exchange of different forms of energy and energy overall conservation (what is still accepted as the “first law of thermodynamics”). Their work was soon allied with the theories of similar but less-known work by the German physician Julius Robert von Mayer and physicist and physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz on the conservation of forces.