Discovery and Invention
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Discovery and Invention’
Benjamin Jesty and Edward Jenner continue to save millions of lives because they listened to an old wives’ tale.
Surgeon Edward Jenner (1749-1823) and farmer Benjamin Jesty (1736-1816) are rightly credited with saving more lives than anyone else, by conceiving and demonstrating the principle of vaccination. What is less often emphasised is that it only happened because they listened respectfully to an old wives’ tale.
Mark Twain covets the supreme sensation of being a trailblazer.
On a visit to Rome, American novelist Mark Twain reflects (tongue-in-cheek) that everything in that ancient city has been seen before by someone. How much better, he suggests, to be an idle Roman, for then all the undiscovered secrets of the New World would be yours to find!
Lord Armstrong’s home was an Aladdin’s cave of Victorian technology.
Modern ‘green’ policies cost money and jobs, and blight the environment. Victorian industrialist Lord Armstrong managed to conserve the environment and yet also trial a range of emerging technologies that now bring comfort and prosperity to hundreds of millions of people.
Railways not only brought fresh, healthy food to the urban poor, they improved the conditions of working animals.
In the 1850s, London could not house enough cows for its population, so dairymen watered down their milk from cholera-infested roadside pumps, adding snails or sheep’s brains to thicken it (more). No legislation could have solved that dilemma of supply and demand. But railways did.