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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 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. 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... 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.
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Title portraits: Nobel Prize Photo Montage:
Robert Hooke memorial window (now destroyed) in St. Helen's Bishopsgate
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