Thursday, May 19, 2011

Field Trip

No, I am not dead, just trying to move an NMR, finish the semesters classes, create an online course for the continuing education college, get three Masters students to thesis, write annual reports for student development grants, and attend all the end of year celebrations, and dire budget meetings on the agenda.  Actually writing that fills me with a mixture of exhaustion and panic as I still have much to do.

Those who think I need a break convinced me to go to the Huntington Library and Museum yesterday.  Being a science book collector I was looking forward to the exhibit on the Regency period in England (1810-1820).  I was not let down as they had one case on the science of the period which included one of Davy’s coal damp papers and two books by Frederic Accum.

The regency period was one of significant advances in science and industry as it was the beginning of the industrial age.  The people’s interest in science was great and the middle classes would read scientific literature of the day. 

Out of this period came the practice of public lectures where you could subscribe to lectures on chemistry by Davy himself.  It was in such lectures that an apprentice bookbinder named Michael Faraday came; being gifted the lecture tickets by someone who was not interested in attending after the first couple of lectures in the series.  He wrote up the notes he took and bound them, which earned him a meeting with Davy and ultimately a place as a dishwasher in the lab.  The rest of this digression is history.

In looking at a case focused on the theater of the period I noticed something interesting in a diary entry for an Anna Mararette Lapent.  Apparently she was quite a theater maven and wrote volumes about the plays she attended and books she read.  At the bottom of the open page about February 1814 in the case at the Huntington is the following; “During the week read two lectures of Davy’s on agricultural chemistry."  There was something written after that which I could not make out.

If only my students were reading two of Hall’s lectures on organic each week, what new flowering of science might we see.

T.S. Hall

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