Contemporary Inventions and Discoveries
Mr. Piesse, the well-known operative chemist, has thus popularly grouped some of the leading novelties of our age:
The inventions and discoveries of my time may truly be included among some of the greatest and most wonderful which the world has seen. I have not yet passed forty summers, but perfectly recollect being one of the gaping crowd that first witnessed lighting the streets with gas. Near to the Marble Arch, at the top of Oxford-street, London, stands an iron post, on which is inscribed “Here stood Tyburn Gate, 1829.” Now I well remember this Oxford-street turnpike, and the oil-lamps ‘dimly burning,’ which enabled the University coach and the eight-horse waggons to nearside the off-side gatepost; at that time all Oxford-street and the shops therein protested against ‘the light of other days,’ and became illumined with Murdoch’s gas: thus the oil-lamps passed away for ever. Tunneling Primrose Hill for the first railway into London was a fund of enjoyment to me; there I learned my first practical lesson in mineralogy—to distinguish iron pyrites from real gold nuggets, which it at times resembles. One morning the newspapers teemed with an account of the late Duke of Wellington witnessing the first electric telegram from Drayton, twelve miles from London. People flocked to Paddington, and paid a shilling to do the same; of course I was among them! It appears to me but the other day when every housewife kept her linen rags to make tinder. The bunch of matches, like a large fan, the flint and steel were in every house. What a change has the lucifer produced? After hearing Professor Brande one night deliver a popular lecture at the Royal Institution, the Secretary read a letter received that day from Paris, announcing the discoveries of Daguerre. The assertion that the picture of a camera could be fixed by the mere agency of light startled belief, yet from that hour photography took its rise. Strange discoveries now crowd upon the memory. The oxyhydrogen flame that burns the diamond and volatilizes platinum; then came the Drummond lime-light that is visible as a star sixty miles away; now followed Dobereiner’s lamp that ignites itself when you lift a latch. Electroplating becomes one of the arts of the country. A new force of nature, actinism, was recognised. Wonderfully active principles of plants—quinine, morphia, and strychnine, are discovered. The food of plants and the balance of organic nature are developed at Giessen. New metals are discovered and are practically eliminated for the use of manufacturers; and so we thus come to the present, when I now write with an aluminium pen made from tiles laid in a wall when Constantine was crowned at York.18