Abstract
The present work is a translation from french to english of our previous \g{Démocrite et la puissance motrice du feu}, amended on a number of respects. It is mainly of historical and pedagogical interest. We suggest that the concepts introduced in the ancien Greece by Anaximander (flat earth) and Democritus (corpuscles moving in vacuum) allow us to obtain through qualitative observations and plausible generalizations the maximum efficiency and work of heat engines, results that were firmly established around 1824 by Carnot. A prologue introduces the subject. We next present the concept of thermal equilibrium and consider a model consisting of two reservoirs located at different altitudes, each with $g$ sites. Each site may contain a specified number of corpuscles. One particular site plays the role of \g{working agent}. We subsequently consider an alternative model consisting of independent corpuscles submitted to gravity and in contact with heat baths. Only average quantities are considered, leaving out fluctuations and questions of stability.