To most students today the mechanical equivalent of heat, called the Mayer-Joule principle, is simply a way to convert from calories to joules and vice versa. However, in linking work and heat--once thought to be disjointed concepts--it goes far beyond unit conversion. Heat had eluded understanding for two centuries after Galileo Galilei constructed an early thermometer. Independently, Julius Robert Mayer and James Prescott Joule found the connection between heat and work, the Mayer-Joule principle.