Canada and the World
Current Events with a Canadian Perspective
Last update
21 December 2010
Science Timeline Part Seven
Mid-
precedes the Industrial Revolution
In Scotland, Joseph Black came up with a big breakthrough in 1754. He produced carbon dioxide by heating calcium carbonate (limestone). This proved that gases could be formed from ordinary solids.
A few years later, Black discovered latent heat and measured it in steam. One of
students was James Watt, who later used the properties of latent heat to improve
the steam engine.
Joseph Black’s work on gases intrigued others, one of whom was Henry Cavendish. He found that some metals, if mixed with acid, liberated a flammable gas. Cavendish called it “fire air;” we call it hydrogen.
That was 1766, at the same time as another English chemist, Joseph Priestley, was
dissolving carbon dioxide in water. The result was soda water. Add sugar and flavouring
and you have pop. Mr. Priestley may be viewed as the father of the gigantic soft-
He also discovered that plants take in carbon dioxide and convert it to oxygen. He proved this with an elegantly simple experiment in 1771.
He placed a lit candle in an enclosed vessel. When the candle went out he knew all the oxygen was gone and mostly just carbon dioxide remained. Then, he put a sprig of mint in a glass of water into the carbon dioxide. The plant lived for months and flourished. Then, he put a mouse into the vessel and found that it survived.
So, he concluded, the plant had converted the carbon dioxide back into oxygen. This was the first realization that plants and animals formed a chemical balance that kept Earth’s atmosphere breathable.
In 1779, the Dutch physician Jan Ingenhousz (see Part Six) repeated Priestley’s experiment
and added the discovery that light was an essential part of the equation. In the
dark, plants consumed oxygen and gave off carbon dioxide. The process of plant growth
came to be called by a name that put together Greek words meaning “to put together
by light” – photosythesis.
The Industrial Revolution
In 1781, science and technology came together to create one of the most fundamental changes in society. In that year, James Watt and Matthew Boulton built a steam engine that turned a wheel. In that instant, the world and its history completely changed.
Chris Allen
Steam power meant that machines no longer had to rely on wind, water, or animal power. With reliable and powerful steam engines becoming available the industrial production of goods was possible.
Factories were built and people moved from villages to fast-
This was the Industrial Revolution, which at first was confined to Britain. This was because the British refused to share their inventions with anyone else, hoping to exploit them to become the world’s leading economic power.
But, the Brits overlooked Sam Slater. He carefully memorized all the detail of the
cotton-
In 1789, he sold his knowledge to rich merchants in Rhode Island and seems to have lived quite well thereafter. Sam Slater was probably the first industrial spy. By the middle of the 19th century, the revolution had taken hold almost everywhere in the northern hemisphere.
Discoveries in Energy, Astronomy
The Age of Enlightenment/ Age of Reason period is said to have ended in 1780. The scientific developments of the previous century paved the way for the Industrial Revolution and for further advances in science.
These included the atomic theory of matter put forward by the British chemist and physicist John Dalton (1808); the electromagnetic theories of Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell (1820s), also of Great Britain; and the law of the conservation of energy (1843), explained by the British physicist James Prescott Joule and others.
With better and better telescopes, astronomers were getting a better understanding of space. Isaac Newton had already figured out that the Earth was not a perfect sphere (1688), and in 1755 the German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, suggest the Sun was one of many stars in a galaxy.
NASA Image
Kant also thought there might be other galaxies, which he called “island universes.”
These appeared as fuzzy blobs of light in the eyepiece of 18th century telescopes.
By 1785, magnification had improved enough for William Herschel to speculate that
galaxies might be lens-
Five years later, Herschel announced the discovery of infrared radiation – energy emitted as electromagnetic waves. And, in 1801, Johann Ritter discovered ultraviolet radiation.
Painless Surgery
A medical advance much appreciated by patients was anesthesia. The Japanese physician Hanaoka Seishu performed the first surgery under a general anesthetic in 1805. It took Western doctors 35 years to catch on. By then, Crawford Long had come across ether.
In the early 1800s people began inhaling ether at parties to get a buzz. Dr. Long,
a physician in Jefferson, Georgia, frequently prepared ether at the request of his
friends. One evening he used it himself at a so-
Perhaps, ether could be used to control pain thought Long. At this time, few people underwent surgery. It was ferociously painful and used only if certain death was the alternative. Many, chose death as the better of two very bad choices.
In March 1842, Long persuaded a very reluctant James Venable to undergo surgery using ether. Mr. Venable had two cysts in his neck and they were removed while he was unconscious. The operation was a success, and Venable, amazed, felt no pain at all.
A dentist called William Morton swiped Dr. Long’s anesthesia technique. In 1846, he used ether to knock out a couple of patients at Boston’s Massachusetts General Hospital in front of an audience of famous surgeons. The results were published, and anesthesia was soon used around the world. Crawford Williamson Long received no credit for the discovery.
Image credit
Aldo C. Zavala
© Canada and the World, December 2010
All rights reserved
Even though many improvements have been made to James Watt’s steam engine it still only converts seven percent of the energy of burning fuel into work. The rest is lost in waste heat.This inefficiency and the pollution caused by burning coal and wood led to the world’s railways converting to diesel and electric trains. However, according to Kirsty Walk of the BBC steam may be making a comeback.
1791
The Italian physician Luigi Galvani shows, albeit by accident, that the motor nerves of frogs can be stimulated by electricity. While cutting a frog leg Galvani’s steel scalpel touched a brass hook that was holding the leg in place and the leg twitched. This was the beginning of the study of bioelectricity, the electrical patterns and signals of the nervous systems of animals.
1793
Eli Whitney in the United States invents the cotton gin for cleaning cotton (the word gin is short for engine)
1796
Edward Jenner is an English physician who lives in farming country. He hears stories
about people catching cowpox, which is a very mild disease resembling smallpox and
common among cows. The most interesting part is that anyone who comes down with cowpox
never gets it again and never catches smallpox either. Smallpox is often fatal and
if you did recover you are likely to be left quite dramatically disfigured. By 1796,
Dr. Jenner has an idea about how this cowpox/smallpox thing is working. He finds
a milkmaid undergoing an attack of cowpox. He takes fluid from a blister on her hand
and injects it into an eight-
(As previously noted in Part Six, Lady Mary Wortley Montague had come up Jenner’s idea in 1718.)
1796
Napoleon Bonaparte offers a 12,000 franc reward to anyone who can find a way of preserving
fresh food for a long period of time to sustain his soldiers. Nicolas-
1800
Alessandro Volta invents the electrical battery.
1801
Joseph-
1803
For more than a century, physicists had been arguing about the nature of light; some said it was particles, others that it was waves. In 1803, Thomas Young settles the matter with a series of experiments; light is carried on waves.
1809
British scientist George Cayley publishes On Aerial Navigation in which he correctly describes the principles of active flight and thereby begins the science of aerodynamics.
Between 1810 and 1819
Franz Joseph Gall, a German physiologist, publishes four volumes explaining human
behaviours and locating parts of the brain connected to them. He was a bit off the
mark in saying that bumps in the cranium related to psychological effects (there
are still plenty of people today who believe in so-
1816
A French physician, Rene Laennec, has a moment of inspiration, bends a notebook into a cylinder, holds it to his patient’s chest and finds he can hear the heartbeat more clearly – the stethoscope is invented.
1818
A paper is published entitled Two Essays... with some observations on the causes
of the differences of colour and form between the white and negro races of men. It
is written by William Charles Wells, a Scottish-
THE IRON MAN
For 3,000 years, people had been smelting iron ore by using charcoal. In Britain,
the forests were fast disappearing to supply fuel and the price of charcoal was sky-
“…it might be supposed that the adoption of painless surgery would have been uniformly welcomed...by theologians, moral philosophers, and medical scientists alike.
“Yet this was not always the case. Advocates of the ‘healing power of pain’ put up fierce if disorganized resistance.”