The Mémoires appear in the Histoire de l'Académie Royale des Sciences, année 1699, which was published in 1732. Amontons (20 June 1699) "Moyen de substituer commodement l'action du feu, à la force des hommes et des chevaux pour mouvoir les machines" (Means of conveniently substituting the action of fire for the force of men and horses in order to move machines), Mémoires de l'Académie Royale des Sciences, pages 112-126.The heated air expanded and, via tubes, forced water from one chamber to another, unbalancing the wheel and causing it to turn. Air-filled chambers on the wheel's rim were heated by a fire under one side of the wheel. Around the wheel's hub were water-filled chambers. In 1699, Guillaume Amontons (1663–1705) presented, to the Royal Academy of Sciences in Paris, a report on his invention: a wheel that was made to turn by heat. Devices called hot air engines, or simply air engines, have been recorded from as early as 1699. Hero of Alexandria's Pneumatica describes devices that might be used to automatically open temple doors when a fire was lit on a sacrificial altar. The expansive property of heated air was known to the ancients. Continuous combustion types, such as George Brayton's Ready Motor and the related gas turbine, could be seen as borderline cases. Also excluded are conventional internal combustion engines, in which heat is added to the working fluid by combustion of fuel within the working cylinder. The term "hot air engine" specifically excludes any engine performing a thermodynamic cycle in which the working fluid undergoes a phase transition, such as the Rankine cycle. It is now in the collection of Thinktank, Birmingham Science Museum. A praxinoscope made by Ernst Plank, of Nuremberg, Germany, and powered by a miniature hot air engine.
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