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Chemistry Pages:
A level
Reaction catalogues, exam tips, spectra, worksheets, articles and much more...

Chemistry Pages: GCSE
Extraction of metals, reaction catalogue.

Learning to Learn
Learning is not instinctive - learn how to learn.

Robert Hooke
England's Leonardo.

Radio Pages
Amateur radio, Army radios of WWII.

Canals 
The Birmingham Canals.

Railways 
The 'Schools' of the SR.

Aircraft Pages
The Boeing 747, the physics of flight, and why a crane fly is like a 747.

Rubaiyat  
of Omar Khayyam

About Rod

Contact

Westminster School

The Royal Institution Christmas Lectures were inaugurated by Michael Faraday. His 1860 Lectures on the Chemical History of the Candle represent some of the finest scientific writing ever produced. You can find them here.

Dr Rod Beavon,   17 Dean’s Yard,   London SW1P 3PB.

Web site content  © JRG Beavon 1997-2009
unless otherwise credited. All rights reserved.

First edition: 18th July 1998. This edition: 1st January 2009


"The First Day"

There was a babel of voices, and a curious odour, not of humanity as in the village school, but of something extraordinary, a smell which came almost visibly down the passage, penetrating the cloakroom and hall.

Girls shuddered delicately and turned up their little noses, and made wry faces of elegant disgust, as they told each other "Sulphuretted hydrogen".

Sulphuretted hydrogen! Susan was enchanted with the new word, and she forgot her embarrassment and shyness in utter bliss that she was breathing air tinged, nay saturated, with such romantic odours. That was what she longed to meet, a genie from the science room. But as she stood, absorbing the chemistry room smells, staring down the passage at the closed door of the paradise where the alchemist lived with his retorts and crucibles, his crystals and poisons....

Alison Uttley, "The Farm on the Hill", Faber & Faber 1941.

Alison Uttley became famous as an author of childrens' books, notably the 'Little Grey Rabbit' series which features Moldy Warp the Mole. Alison Uttley's childhood was spent on a farm near Cromford in the Derbyshire Peak District. She gained a scholarship to Lady Manners School in Bakewell, travelling there from Cromford on the train each day. "The Farm on the Hill" is an autobiographical novel which gives the background of country life at the end of the 19th century that she used so effectively in the Little Grey Rabbit stories. From Bakewell she went to the University of Manchester to read Physics, being the first full-time woman graduate in Physics from the University.

Her initial experience of hydrogen sulphide - the quintessential smell of the chemistry laboratory for decades - was almost the same as mine. I too smelt it first as a faint hint of the joys to come in a laboratory which was also next to a railway line on one of the most spectacular gradients out of Birmingham. Chemistry and railways - a heady combination indeed!

 


You don't have to spell sulphur with an f! Read more...

Many of you will have found that exam boards have decided to go along with a recommendation from QCA and the RSC that sulphur should be spelled with an 'f' rather than 'ph', ostensibly to 'avoid confusion'. Who is confused? You don't have to spell it with an -f- ; using the -ph- form is not a mark-deductible offence, in case you were worried.

The defining dictionary for British English is the Oxford English Dictionary - a work of dazzling scholarship by a huge number of people over many decades. I take my authority from that. Sulfur is not listed in the online version; if you type it in you get sulphur. Of course sulfur is given as an alternative (American) form, but the -ph- spelling has been around since at least the 14th century and has been universal since the spelling of British English became standardised several centuries ago.

There are seven towns in America named for element 16: in Louisiana, Oklahoma, Nevada, Texas, Wyoming, Arkansas, and South Dakota. All of them named Sulphur.

 

Title portraits: Nobel Prize
Winners in Chemistry
1938 - 1947:

1938 Richard Kuhn
1939 Adolf Butenandt
        Leopold Ruzicka
1940 - 42 not awarded
1943 George de Hevesy
1944 Otto Hahn
1945 Artturi Virtanen
1946 James B Sumner
        John H Northrop
        Wendell M Stanley
1947 Sir Robert Robinson

Further details are on the Nobel website.
Title bar photos
© Nobel Foundation.
 

Photo Montage:

Robert Hooke memorial window (now destroyed) in St. Helen's Bishopsgate
Schools' Class 'Stowe'
KLM 747-400
Roses in English Canal style
Samuel Morse in youth and old age
Hooke's Law: "as the tension, so the extension"

 

 

 

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