In thermodynamics, Humphry Davy (1778-1829) was an English chemist noted for his 1799 “ice-rubbing experiments”, where in a room colder than the freezing point of water, he generated heat or made ice melt by the mechanical rubbing of cubes together. By doing this, Davy demonstrated the conversion of work into heat and that indefinite amounts of heat could be generated from a body, this being contrary to caloric theory, which limits the amount. [1] Concerning the view of a person as a human atom, in 1813 Davy described man as a “point atom”. [2] Davy was one of the first, along side of Isaac Newton, Daniel Bernoulli, Benjamin Thomson, to have enunciated the view that force is conserved as in the conservation of force. [3]

References
1. Milestones in Thermodynamics – Thermal Physics, University of Notre Dame.
2. Levere, Trevor, H. (1971). Affinity and Matter – Elements of Chemical Philosophy 1800-1865. Great Britain: Oxford University Press.
3. Helmholtz, Hermann. (1862). “On the Conservation of Force: Introduction to a Series of Lectures Delivered at Carlsruhe in the Winter of 1862-63” [URL]. In Scientific Papers: the Harvard Classics. Translated by Edmund Atkinson.

External links
● Humphry Davy – Wikipedia.
● Humphry Davy – Eric Weisstein’s World of Scientific Biography.