Volume 2

Essays in historical chemistry / by T.E. Thorpe.

  • Thorpe, T. E. (Thomas Edward), 1845-1925.
Date:
1902
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Essays in historical chemistry / by T.E. Thorpe. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    development of applied electricity as we see it to-day in electrolytic decompositions, in the electric light, and in the applications of electricity as a source of power, alone possible. The Queen, indeed, may be said to have witnessed as Queen the birth of this marvellous applica¬ tion of natural energy, to have lived with it through its vigorous youth, and to have seen the promise of a fruition so vast that no man can set bounds to it. She might have seen the simple, fundamental, and yet ever- striking experiments out of which has grown the multi¬ farious machinery that modern industrial electricity has called into existence. Try to realise the difference between Faraday’s simple home-made apparatus, his copper discs, his bits of soft iron, wound with wire, insulated with calico and twine, and the mighty dynamos which are converting the energy of “a harnessed Niagara” into heat and light, and chemical action, and supplying power to a continent! And all this within the span of a single reign ; within the compass of a couple of generations ! This astonishing movement is what historians will ever recognise as the characteristic feature of the Victorian Era. It has wholly changed the economic and social condition not only of our own people, but of every country which has had the intelligence and the wisdom to participate in it, or to avail itself of its fruits. It has acted and reacted not only on industry, and on the material benefits that attend on industry, but on every department of intel¬ lectual power. It has changed, although hardly with a commensurate rapidity, the face of our educational system. To judge what the change has been, let us try to realise how chemistry was taught in 1837. As a part of school education it was practically unknown, although children whose parents had the good fortune 2 p