Revisiting Black’s experiments on the latent heats of water Available to Purchase

Historical experiments may help students to better understand some physical phenomena. We reproduced Black’s original experiments on the latent heats of water (fusion and vaporization). To obtain both latent heats with reasonable accuracy we needed concepts, which were not used by Black, such as the water equivalent of a calorimeter and Newton’s law of cooling. The melting experiment is adequate to obtain an accurate value for the latent heat with a small uncertainty, but the same is not true for the vaporization experiment.