Mathias Frisch has argued that the requirement that electromagnetic dispersion processes are causal adds empirical content not found in electrodynamic theory. The unanswerable historical question is whether Sadi would have sought a general theory of heat engines at all or found these general theoretical devices without the template provided in analogy by the prior work of Lazare.
Lazare’s strategies for controlling dissipation and optimizing his machines were transferrable to the analogous problems Sadi found in heat engines. This historically ill-fated choice meant that Lazare’s machines were analogous to Sadi’s heat engines in their key aspects: they are built from essentially dissipative processes. Lazare’s work could provide these resources because of its choice of a dissipative ontology of inelastic collisions among hard bodies. The work of Sadi’s father, Lazare Carnot, on the efficiency of ordinary machines provided Sadi with a template of a very general theory of the efficiency of ordinary machines and a characterization of the most efficient processes in them as those that minimize differences of driving forces and can be run in reverse. It requires the states of these processes to be both in unchanging equilibrium, with a perfect balance of driving forces, while also changing.
It succeeded in its audacious goal of finding a very general theory of the efficiency of heat engines, by introducing and exploiting the strange and unexpected notion of a thermodynamically reversible process. Sadi Carnot’s 1824 Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire created the new science of thermodynamics.