Discovery and Invention
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Discovery and Invention’
It was not just his own family that wanted to know what Samuel Crompton was doing by night in his quaint Bolton workshop.
In 1779 Samuel Crompton, who came from a family of Bolton weavers, developed the ‘spinning mule’ — so called because it was a hybrid of two existing machines for spinning cotton thread, the spinning jenny and the waterframe. He kept his invention secret, but the quantities of superfine yarn he released onto the local market excited the envy, curiosity and resourcefulness of his rivals.
Sir Humphry Davy explains in simple terms what it is that leads to scientific progress.
In 1812, research chemist and popular lecturer Humphry Davy was knighted for his services to Science. In that same year, he published an overview of his discipline, Elements of Chemical Philosophy, and prefaced it with an introduction to the basics of the new scientific method. There were, he said, three essential components to it.
Edward III enticed over-regulated Dutch textile workers across the Channel with the promise of English beef and English beauties.
In the days of Edward III (1327-1377), English wool was the finest in Europe; but as we knew no more what to do with our wool (wrote Thomas Fuller) than the sheep that wear it, we exported it raw to the Continent and imported the finished cloth at a high price. Lesser men might have imposed taxes, subsidies or price controls to balance the economy, but Edward had a much better idea: some healthy competition.
Toby ‘Trotty’ Veck used to love hearing the church bells ring the New Year in, but now the chimes make him feel guilty, and afraid for the world.
It is New Year’s Eve, but old Toby ‘Trotty’ Veck, a hard-up widower, is not celebrating. Alderman Cute has got him so worked up about a sustainable economy, food injustice and industrialisation that Trotty despairs for future generations if things carry on as they are. Even the church bells seem to toll the death knell of Victorian England. But that night, the spirits of the bells rise up to demand an apology.
The modern match is ignited by friction, a simple idea but one which had not occurred to anyone until 1826, when a Stockton pharmacist dropped a stick.
Until 1826, lighting a fire, a candle or a pipe was not an easy business. Matches as we know them were in their infancy, a toilsome affair requiring a man to juggle little bottles of noxious chemicals and perhaps a pair of pliers. But that year, a merry pharmacist from Stockton-on-Tees called John Walker (1781-1859) liberated us from all this, and quite by accident.
In 1609, Englishman Thomas Harriot turned his new-fangled telescope on the moon, and sketched for the first time the face of another world.
Three hundred years after the death of Thomas Harriot or Hariot (?1560-1621), the American journal Science sketched the life of a man who, though almost forgotten by succeeding generations, was involved in some of the greatest discoveries of European science, and embroiled in some of the most stirring events in English politics.