In 1840, James Prescott Joule submitted to the Royal Society a paper describing experimental research on the heat produced by electric currents in metallic conductors, and inferring that the effect was proportional to the resistance of the conductors and to the square of the intensity of the current. Only an abstract of this paper was published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, although a full paper with a similar title was printed in the Philosophical Magazine in 1841. Several authors have assumed that the content of the 1841 publication was the same as the rejected 1840 paper; however, the unpublished manuscript has been found within the archives of the Royal Society and is published here for the first time, along with a detailed analysis and comparison with the 1841 paper. The unpublished version is much shorter, and is different in certain respects from the published article. A detailed comparison throws light on several shortcomings of the unpublished version. The present work also studies the assessment of Joule's paper by the Royal Society, and elucidates the roles of Peter Roget and Samuel Christie in this connection.

1840 年，James Prescott Joule 向皇家学会提交了一篇论文，描述了对金属导体中电流产生的热量的实验研究，并推断该效应与导体的电阻和电流强度的平方成正比. 这篇论文的摘要只发表在英国皇家学会学报上，尽管在哲学杂志上发表了一篇具有相似标题的完整论文。1841 年。一些作者假设 1841 年出版物的内容与 1840 年被拒绝的论文相同；然而，在皇家学会的档案中发现了未发表的手稿，并首次在这里发表，并与 1841 年的论文进行了详细的分析和比较。未发表的版本要短得多，并且在某些方面与已发表的文章不同。详细的比较揭示了未发布版本的几个缺点。目前的工作还研究了皇家学会对 Joule 论文的评估​​，并阐明了 Peter Roget 和 Samuel Christie 在这方面的作用。