Discovery and Invention
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Discovery and Invention’
The Dublin to Dun Laoghaire line opened in 1834, and proved a remarkable testimony to the speed of technological progress.
In 1825, the world’s first railway carrying fare-paying public passengers opened, triumphantly tackling the eight-mile stretch between Stockton and Darlington in three hours. Just nine years later, Ireland acquired its own first railway, from Dublin to Dun Laoghaire, and the six-mile journey was over in twenty minutes.
William Hyde Wollaston discovered new elements and helped Faraday to greatness, all from the top of a tea-tray.
A Royal Commission observed in 1819 that while metric measurements do have clear advantages, for many practical purposes imperial measurements are actually more convenient. One of the members of this remarkably sensible Commission was Dr William Wollaston (1766-1828), a man of unimpeachable scientific pedigree.
Faraday’s work on electromagnetism made him an architect of modern living, and one of Albert Einstein’s three most revered physicists.
American physicist Albert Einstein kept three portraits on his wall, men who had inspired his own world-changing study of physics. They were all British: Sir Isaac Newton, James Clerk Maxwell, and Michael Faraday (1791-1867).
What George Stephenson was to the railways of England, Sandford Fleming was to the railways of Canada.
At the start of the nineteenth century, railways brought a handful of struggling colonies together to form a great nation, and Sandford Fleming (1827-1915), then just a young Scottish surveyor from Kirkcaldy, played as important a part in that as any other man.
Elizabethan adventurer Sir Francis Drake combined sailing round the world with really annoying the King of Spain.
Elizabethan adventurer Sir Francis Drake was only the second man in history to circumnavigate the globe, a feat he achieved in 1580 aboard the famous ‘Golden Hinde’. His attention was not, however, concentrated exclusively on making historic discoveries.
The textile moguls of Manchester and Liverpool engaged the Stephensons to complete their link to the capital.
After the Liverpool and Manchester Railway was linked to Birmingham by the Grand Junction Railway, it made sense for the business tycoons of the North West to extend this exhilarating new form of transport to London, and George and Robert Stephenson were given the job.