Discovery and Invention
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Discovery and Invention’
James Cook describes his first sight of a beloved Australian icon.
James Cook captained ‘Endeavour’ on a round trip to New Zealand and Australia from 1768 to 1771. Between June and August 1770, the ship lay at the mouth of the Endeavour (Wabalumbaal) River in north Queensland, undergoing repairs. Cook kept a meticulous journal, in which he described some of the animals he saw.
A twelve-year-old girl from Lyme Regis made a historic discovery while selling seashells to tourists.
Around the time that the fictional Anne Elliot paid a visit to Lyme Regis in Jane Austen’s novel ‘Persuasion’, in real life a young girl named Mary Anning was chipping away at the nearby cliffs, and had already entered the history books.
Sixteen-year-old John Wesley Hackworth brought a locomotive over to St Petersburg, and Russia’s railway revolution was ready for the off.
British engineers and a sixteen-year-old boy played a key part in helping Imperial Russia begin her own railway revolution. In one respect, however, Russia failed to learn from the example the United Kingdom set for her: private enterprise.
A long-lived annual of riddles, rhymes and really hard maths aimed specifically at Georgian Britain’s hidden public of clever women.
The 18th century was deluged with popular magazines, almanacks and annuals filled with tidbits, extracts and riddling rhymes, but few could rival John Tipper’s “Ladies’ Diary” for longevity or circulation – or for sheer hard maths.
At fifteen John Dalton was a village schoolmaster in Kendal; at forty he had published the first scientific theory of atoms.
John Dalton (1766-1844) and his contemporary Sir Humphrey Davy could not have been less alike. Davy was a gifted communicator with an international profile; Dalton was tongue-tied and uncomfortable south of Cheshire. But both made historic discoveries, and where Davy left us Faraday, Dalton gave us Joule.
Samuel Smiles explains why the London and Birmingham Railway was an achievement superior to the Great Pyramid of Giza.
When the London and Birmingham Railway opened in 1838, it was an engineering marvel. But progress from the era of the Great Pyramids to Britain’s railways did not lie in engineering alone. It lay in the fact that the industrial revolution was an achievement not of servants gratifying a political elite, but of free men pursuing their own advantages.