In the history of science, the theory of heat or mechanical theory of heat was a theory,

introduced in 1798 by Sir Benjamin Thompson, better known as Count Rumford and developed
more thoroughly in 1824 by the French physicist Sadi Carnot, that heat and mechanical work are
equivalent.
[1]

[2]
It is related to the mechanical equivalent of heat. Over the next century, with the
introduction of the second law of thermodynamics in 1850 by Rudolf Clausius, this theory
evolved into the science of thermodynamics. In 1851, in his "On the Dynamical Theory of Heat",
William Thomson outlined the view, as based on recent experiments by those such as James
Joule, that heat is not a substance, but a dynamical form of mechanical effect, we perceive that
there must be an equivalence between mechanical work and heat, as between cause and effect.
[3]

In the years to follow, the phrase the "dynamical theory of heat" slowly evolved into the new
science of thermodynamics. In 1876, for instance, American civil engineer Richard Sears
McCulloh, in his Treatise on the Mechanical Theory of Heat, stated that: the mechanical theory
of heat, sometimes called thermo-dynamics, is that branch of science which treats of the
phenomena of heat as effects of motion and position.