Christmas At The Royal Institution: An Anthology of Lectures by Frank James

By Frank James

Because the mid-1820s, a sequence of lectures has been introduced every year over the Christmas interval within the world-famous Faraday Lecture Theatre on the Royal establishment of significant Britain through popular scientists, addressed particularly to an viewers of kids. at first made available in publication shape, the lectures were nationally televised through the united kingdom and disbursed world wide because the Nineteen Sixties, making them available to an excellent greater viewers. the significance of those lectures in selling technology to a extensive viewers could be top gauged via the truth that a picture of 1 of Faraday's lectures seemed at the financial institution of britain ??20 observe within the Nineteen Nineties. This anthology brings jointly, for the 1st time, a gently selected collection of eleven lectures from the 1860s to the Nineties. the choice contains lectures via Michael Faraday, arguably crucial and influential 19th-century physicist, and Lawrence Bragg, the youngest ever winner of the Nobel Prize. via this paintings, readers will come to grips with the altering nature of well known technology lectures during the last a hundred and forty years. Contents: The Correlation of the actual Forces (M Faraday); Carbon or Charcoal Coal gasoline respiratory and Its Analogy to the Burning of a Candle end (M Faraday); The varieties of Water in Clouds and Rivers, Ice and Glaciers (J Tyndall); classes in electrical energy (J Tyndall); Stars (R S Ball); R?¶ntgen gentle (S P Thompson); the good Extinct Reptiles Dinosaurs from the Oolites The Pariasaurus and Inostransevia from the Trias of North Russia and South Africa Marine Reptiles (E R Lankester); The Atoms of Which issues Are Made (W H Bragg); Our electric offer (W L Bragg); gadgets and images (R L Gregory); Gallery of Monsters (I Stewart).

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Additional info for Christmas At The Royal Institution: An Anthology of Lectures by M. Faraday, J. Tyndall, R. S. Ball, S. P. Thompson, E. R. Lankester, W. H. Bragg, W. L. Bragg, R. L. Gregory, and I. Stewart

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I will light it, and as long as there is any gas in this cylinder it will go on burning. You see no carbon, but you see a flame, and because that is bright it will lead you to guess that there is carbon in the flame. But I will show it to you by another process. I have some of the same gas in another vessel, mixed with a body that will burn the hydrogen of the gas, but will not burn the carbon. I will light them with a burning taper, and you perceive the hydrogen is consumed, but not the carbon, which is left behind as a dense black smoke.

Here we have another instance of chemical action. I take these platinum plates again and immerse them in this solution of copper from which we formerly precipitated some of the metal, when the platinum and zinc were both put in it together. You see that these two platinum plates have no chemical action of any kind, they might remain in the solution as long as I liked, without having any power of themselves to reduce the copper; but the moment I bring the two poles of the battery in contact with them, the chemical action which is there transformed into electricity and carried along the wires, again becomes chemical action at the two platinum poles, and now we shall have the power appearing on the left hand side, and throwing down the copper in the metallic state on the platinum plate; and in this way I might give you many instances of the extraordinary way in which this chemical action or electricity may be carried about.

Although he did not specialise in any one area of zoology, his work on embryology, parasitology, and fossil fishes exerted great influence. Stewart, Ian (b. 1945) Christmas Lectures: 1997–1998 Born in Folkestone, Stewart studied mathematics at Churchill College, Cambridge, and then at the University of Warwick where he received his PhD in 1969. qxd 10/17/2007 xxxii 10:13 AM Page xxxii Biographical Notes on Lecturers as a lecturer in mathematics. Promoted to Reader in 1984 and Professor in 1990, he has also held a number of positions overseas, and in 1994 was Gresham Professor of Geometry.

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