Extracts from Scientific Literature
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Extracts from Scientific Literature’
In The Copybook
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Extracts from Scientific Literature’
In The Copybook
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George Stephenson argued that his steam engines were solar-powered.
Today’s enthusiasts for ‘renewable energy’ have brought Britain’s once-mighty coal industry to an end. Yet judging by George Stephenson’s exchange with William Buckland, the eccentric but brilliant Oxford geologist, there may have been a serious misunderstanding...
As a young man, surveyor Thomas Telford was a red-hot political activist who yearned for revolution, but admittedly he had read just one book on the matter.
In 1791 Norfolk-born Thomas Paine (lately of the USA), a vocal enthusiast of the French revolution, published a withering denunciation of the British constitution entitled The Rights of Man. Surveyor Thomas Telford, who was living in Shrewsbury Castle as a guest of the local MP, Sir William Pulteney, was swept away by it, and began recommending it to his friends back home in Galloway.
Thomas Telford told the parish council of St Chad’s Church in Shrewsbury that their leaky roof was the last thing they should worry about.
In July 1788, rising surveyor Thomas Telford was living in Shrewsbury Castle as a guest of the local MP, Sir William Pulteney, who had acquired the historic fortress through his wife Frances and wanted Telford to make it habitable. News of his residence nearby reached the parish council of St Chad’s Church, who thought he might be just the man to mend their leaky roof.
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.
When Robert Southey called for a fairer and greener economy, Thomas Macaulay warned that only politicians and bureaucrats would thank him.
There is nothing new in calling for high taxes to subsidise a fairer, greener economy. Poet Robert Southey did it in 1829, dreaming of a de-industrialised England of apple-cheeked labourers, charming cottages and smiling prosperity. Macaulay dubbed it ‘rose-bushes and poor-rates, rather than steam-engines and independence,’ and reminded him what State-funded projects too often look like.
Alexander Graham Bell was heading for a dead end when a broken component showed him the way.
In 1875, Alexander Graham Bell, a Scotsman working with deaf children in Boston, MA, had rigged up a complex apparatus to transmit sound by electric current. As his assistant Thomas Watson recalled, all was disappointment until one day a tiny contact jammed.
David Livingstone relives the historic moment when he became the first European to see the Victoria Falls.
In 1852-56, David Livingstone mapped the course of the Zambesi, hoping that agricultural trade along the river would crush the horrible trade in slaves (recently outlawed in the British Empire). On November 16, 1855, he was transported by canoe to a magnificent cataract named Mosi-oa-Tunya, ‘the smoke that thunders’, so becoming the first European to see the Victoria Falls.