In history thermodynamics, Henry Brooks Adams (1838-1918) was an American historian noted for his theories on the theoretical relationship between human history and thermodynamics. In 1910, in his Letter to American Teachers of History, Adams' was one of the first to use the term "human molecule" and to use it in a functional sense. One of Adams central goals was to find rules to understand history through the sciences. In 1896, Adams published a 173-page book entitled The Tendency of History, which positioned history in the context of thermodynamics. [8] His brother was Brooks Adams, who also developed an "energetic model" of history in 1895.

In Adams discussions, lectures, and publications, beginning in 1895, on the apparent incompatibilities between the first two laws of thermodynamics, i.e. the law of conservation, "that nothing could be added, and nothing lost, in the sum of energy," and the law of dissipation, "that nothing could be added, but that intensity must be always lost," and the law of evolution, "that vital energy could be added, and raised indefinitely in potential, without the smallest apparent compensation." [1] In other words, Adams seemed to capture the popular view during these years existent between the logic of William Thomson, as found his 1852 paper "On a Universal Tendency in Nature to the Dissipation of Mechanical Energy", which said that natural systems tended to degrade, and the logic of Charles Darwin, in his 1859 Origin of Species, which said that natural systems tended to evolve; an apparent conflict for many, especially in areas such as astrology, geology, biology, botany and most notably for the study of human history.

Education
Adams graduated from Harvard University in 1858. In the years to follow, he toured Europe, during which time he attended lectures in civil law at the University of Berlin. In 1868, Henry Adams returned to the United States and settled down in Washington, D.C., where he started working as a journalist. Adams saw himself as a traditionalist longing for the democratic ideal of the 17th and 18th centuries. Accordingly, he was keen on exposing political corruption in his journalistic pieces. In 1870, Adams was appointed Professor of Medieval History at Harvard, a position he held until his early retirement in 1877 at 39. As an academic historian, Adams is considered to have been the first (in 1874–1876) to conduct historical seminar work in the United States.

One of the high moments in Adams' life was his visit to the great Exposition which opened in Paris on April 15th, 1900. In the Galerie des machines, huge equipment was exhibited, such as dynamos and steam engines: power-generating machines. [6]

Human history and thermodynamics
In 1909, Adams wrote "The Rule of Phase Applied to History," in which he reformulated a theory of scientific history, based on an analogy to American engineer Willard Gibbs’s "Rule of Phase" (phase rule) from his 1876 "On the Equilibrium of Heterogeneous Substances." [5]

In a connected area, in his manuscript The Rule of Phase Applied to History, Adams attempted to use Maxwell’s demon, as an historical metaphor, though he seems to have misunderstood and misapplied the principle. [2] Adams interpreted history as a process moving towards "equilibrium", but he saw militaristic nations (he felt German pre-eminent in this class) as tending to reverse this process, a "Maxwell's demon of history". Adams made many attempts to respond to the criticism of his formulation from his scientific colleagues, but the work remained incomplete at Adams' death in 1918. It was only published posthumously themed or titled on the idea of "degradation". [3]

A Letter to American Teachers of History

See main: A Letter to American Teachers of History

In 1910, at the age of seventy-two, Adams printed and distributed to university libraries and history professors the small volume A Letter to American Teachers of History proposing a "theory of history" based on the second law of thermodynamics, which seemingly had reign over all branches of science except, apparently, human history. In a way, this was a precursor to Arthur Eddington’s 1928 conception of the entropy “arrow of time” in history. [4] In short, he argued that the physics of dynamical systems of Rudolf Clausius, Hermann von Helmholtz, and William Thomson should be applied to the modeling of human history.

In the 1921 Annual Report of the American Historical Association, historian William Thayer comments on Adams’ history thermodynamics commentary by stating that “In reading Henry Adams’ astonishing tract, I can not help suspecting at times that he is making fun of us historians; for he proposes, as I think you would agree with me, something which is not only impossible for anyone to carry out but which he himself never even attempted to carry out. In all the nine volumes of his American History, is there a hint of the second law of thermodynamics? Can you discover the slightest trace of a common formula for history and physical chemistry?” [7]

References
1. Adams, Henry. (1910). A Letter to American Teachers of History. Washington.
2. Cater (1947), pgs. 640-647, see also Daub, E.E. (1967). "Atomism and Thermodynamics". Isis 58: 293-303. reprinted in Leff, H.S. & Rex, A.F. (eds) (1990). Maxwell's Demon: Entropy, Information, Computing. Bristol: Adam-Hilger, 37-51.
3. Adams, H. (1919). The Degradation of the Democractic Dogma. (pg. 267). New York: Kessinger.
4. Eddington, Arthur. (1923). The Nature of the Physical World. Michigan: The University of Michigan Press.
5. A Chronology of Henry Adams Life (adapted from the "Chronology" contained in the three-volume Library of America edition of Adams's major works)
6. The Education of Adams (Henry) / Alamo
7. Thayer, William Roscoe. (1921). “Vagaries of Historians”, in Annual Report of the American Historical Association (pg. 82). American Historical Association, Smithsonian Institution Press.
8. Adams, Henry. (1896). The Tendency of History.The MacMillan Co., 1919, 1929.

Further reading
● Burich, Keith R. (1987). “Henry Adams, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and the Course of History”. Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 48, No. 3 (Jul. - Sep.), pp. 467-482.
● Smith, Crosbie and Higginson, Ian. (2001). “Consuming energies: Henry Adams and 'the tyranny of thermodynamics’”, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, Vol. 26, No. 2, Feb. pgs 103-111(9).

External links
● Henry Adams – Wikipedia.