Page 11 - BBC History The Story of Science & Technology - 2017 UK

1800
Machines have been
generating static
electricity for almost
a century, but
Alessandro Volta’s
pile or battery
produces continuous
current electricity for
the first time. It 1831
stimulates experiment- The possibility of transforming
ers to isolate new motion into electricity is
elements, such as discovered by Michael Faraday
sodium and potassium, (pictured above), the son of a black-
and to split water into smith, who made many other import-
its two component ant discoveries. Electromagnetic
elements: hydrogen induction came to lie at the heart of the
and oxygen. modern electrical industry. Having
initially studied science in his spare
time, he later becomes director
of the laboratory at the Royal
Institution.

1800

1811
Uneducated and from
a poor family, Mary Anning
is 12 when she discovers
the nearly complete
skeleton of what came
to be called an Ichthyo- A scorpion fish, one of the
saurus at Lyme Regis. species Darwin studied on
Soon wealthy collectors his voyages on HMS Beagle
from London take
advantage of her
paleontological 1859
expertise to Charles Darwin publish-
examine dinosaur es On the Origin of
skeletons that Species, having spent
dramatically many years collecting
A 1788 portrait of chemistry pioneers change ideas evidence for his theory
Marie and Antoine Lavoisier
about the of evolution by natural
past. selection, later sum-
1789 marised as ‘the survival of
The French tax collector Antoine Lavoisier the fittest’. By this time,
publishes the first textbook on chemistry. Mary Anning many people have already
GETTY/ALAMY/BRIDGEMAN measurement and systematising the way discovering
accepted that the Earth
He is celebrated for insisting on precise
found fame by
is extremely old.
chemicals are named. The book’s
Jurassic
fossils
accurate technical diagrams, drawn by his
wife, Marie, are essential for transmitting
the new chemistry internationally. Lavoisier
is guillotined during the French Revolution.
The Story of Science & Technology 11