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Your search for Books by Keywords = Inventions has returned 6 results:

Davy, Humphrey. Portrait: "Sir Humphrey Davy". London: Charles Knight, 1837. 8vo. Very good condition. Very fine half-length portrait engrwaving showing Davy head-on after the painting by Sir Thomas LAwrence. Sir Humphrey Davy was an incredible professor, lecturer and writer whose main connection with the Industrial Revolution was his invention of the safety lamp. He was a man who believed that the people deserved the truth in whatever they read. He wanted the people who read his books to know that he worked as hard as he could so that people could better understand the subject. Davy was born in 1778 in Penzance, England to Robert and Grace Millet Davy. He went to a small school there but did not really try to learn until he was taught by Bingham Borlase, a surgeon who later qualified as a physician. Davy's scientific career began in 1798 when he was appointed superintendent of Thomas Beddoes' Pneumatic Institute at Clifton. In 1812 he married a wealthy widow named Jane Appreece; they never had any children but were happy throughout their marriage. Most of the rest of his life was spent working at the Royal Institute in London, and he became its president in 1820. In 1826 he suffered from a stroke and some serious illnesses from which he never fully recovered. Davy loved to read, and with his knowledge he began his career as a chemist and within five years of reading his first chemistry book, he became a teacher of chemistry at the Royal Institute. His first research, which was on the role of light, was published in 1799 in his first book called "An Essay on Heat, Light, and the Combinations of Light." He was impressed with light and believed that the solar system was designed around the sun in order to supply the planets with enough light and heat. Davy was so into his experiments that he once went as far as to breathe in nitrous oxide in order to prove that another chemist was wrong about his hypothesis saying that the gas would kill anyone instantly. Davy's assumption was right, but he did find out about the gas's anesthetic properties right away. After further studies, he suggested that nitrous oxide be used in surgical operations, but nobody took any notice of this recommendation. On another occasion Davy listened to a man speak on alkalizes, and after hearing the lecture, he decided to further investigate them. He specifically studied Calcium, Magnesium, Strontium, and Barium and in conclusion found out that Alkalies were oxides. When Davy returned to England in 1815 from a trip to France to receive a medal established by Napoleon, he was asked to work on explosions for coalmines. He was given a sample of the gasses in the mines and found some methane in the mines. He later found out that methane could only be ignited at high temperatures. Davy constructed lamps in which the air intake and chimney were composed of narrow tubes so that the methane could not come in contact with the flame because the cooling effect of the tube was so great. He also found that a wire-gauze wick was equally efficient; and the Davy lamp, in which wire is wrapped around gauze, was born. His invention worked, and the lamps were used in the mines all around England. Of all Davy's inventions and discoveries, the Davy lamp was the most useful. It saved many lives and made mining a lot safer. Sir Humphrey Davy died in 1828 in Geneva, Switzerland where he had lived for the previous two years. Davy retired there in order to escape his work and so that he could do the things he loved like fishing and hunting. Source: Dictionary of Scientific Biography, Volume 3, Published by American Council of Learned Societies, Printed in New York, New York USA (Book ID 22631) $85.00

La Cour, Paul. Das Phonische Rad, theorie und seine anwendungen in der WIssenschaft, technik und telegraphie. Leipzig: QUandt & Haendel, 1880. 1st German edition. 63pp 8vo. Printed wrappers. Good or better condition. Tiny perforated "LC" (Library of Congress) stamp on titlepage. Translated from the French by Josef Karies, this pamphlet (which is largely unopened)has 14 small but fine text illustrations of the la Cour device. From the excellent website "Adventures in Cybersound": In 1860 Philipp Reis, produced a telephone which could transmit musical notes, and even a lisping word or two; and some ten years later Mr. Cromwell Fleetwood Varley, F.R.S., a well-known English electrician, patented a number of ingenious devices for applying the musical telephone to transmit messages by dividing the notes into short or long signals, after the Morse code, which could be interpreted by the ear or by the eye in causing them to mark a moving paper. These inventions were not put in practice; but four years afterwards Herr Paul la Cour, a Danish inventor, experimented with a similar appliance on a line of telegraph between Copenhagen and Fredericia in Jutland. In this a vibrating tuning-fork interrupted the current, which, after traversing the line, passed through an electro-magnet, and attracted the limbs of another fork, making it strike a note like the transmitting fork. By breaking up the note at the sending station with a signalling key, the message was heard as a series of long and short hums. Moreover, the hums were made to record themselves on paper by turning the electro-magnetic receiver into a relay, which actuated a Morse printer by means of a local battery. (Book ID 21102) $350.00

Tyndall, John. Portrait: "Professor Tyndall". London: "Men of Mark", 1870. 8vo. Very good condition. Very fine woodburytype photographic portrait of Jihn Tyndall. The image is head-and-shoulders and appears in a 4x3" oval on a 9x6" sheet. John Tyndall, FRS, DCL, LLD John Tyndall was born on Aug 2 1820, at Leighlin Bridge, County Carlow, Ireland, the son of a member of the Irish Constabulary. Although he only received a common school education and was denied the advantages of a university education until his 30's, he became one of the great scientists of the 19th century. Among his friends he numbered Louis Pasteur, Michael Faraday, Charles Lister, Thomas Huxley, Leslie Stephens, Thomas Carlyle and Tennyson. Just a few years before his death, the 1888 edition of Prominent Men and Women of the Day noted: "… in a life of the duration of nearly three score and ten this able man has wielded his pen in the cause of science with a steadiness of purpose and a persistency of will that is worthy of praise and emulation". Tyndall left school at the age of 17, with a firm background in basic mathematics, surveying and English composition. In 1839 he joined the Irish Ordnance Survey where he spent three years becoming an accomplished practical surveyor and draftsman. When the Irish survey finished in 1842 he was transferred to the English Survey. In 1843, however, he was dismissed following a formal protest about the efficiency of the service and its treatment of the Irish. He temporarily returned to Ireland until the next year when a position arose in a private surveyors office in England. For the next three years Tyndall was caught up in the railroad boom and travelled extensively in the UK for the construction of the railway network. When this boom waned in 1847 he sought new employment as a mathematics master at Queenwood College Hampshire. After striking up a friendship with the science master - a young chemist called Edward Frankland - both men decided to go to Germany together for a formal science education the next year. In October 1848 at the age of 28, Tyndall and Frankland arrived in Marburg, Germany, where Robert Bunsen made space for them in his lab. Tyndall enrolled in introductory lectures on chemistry, physics and calculus. With a limited knowledge of science and German it was a challenge, but due to Bunsen's inspiration and intense effort Tyndall completed all the work required for his doctoral degree in less than two years. By his second year he decided to concentrate on physics. Tyndall began a series of studies on diamagnetism and magnetic optical properties of crystals. This was to be his major research for nearly six years and the research with which he became known to the scientific world. He extended his stay in Germany a year after his degree, spending several weeks in Gustav Magnus's laboratory in Berlin. During this period he won the respect of many of the finest scientific minds in Germany. Tyndall returned to England in 1851 unable to support himself financially doing research. He spent another two years at Queenwood College, supplementing his income by translating and reviewing foreign science for the Philosophical Magazine, whilst strengthening his ties with influential scientists such as Huxley and Faraday. The change of course for Tyndall came in 1853, aged 33, when it was arranged for him to give a discourse at the Royal Institution. This was so successful that he was invited to give another and then a whole course of lectures. Three months later he was elected Professor of Natural Philosophy and was inundated with work offers. Due to the opportunity to work with Faraday he chose to stay at the Royal Institution. At the Royal Institution Tyndall proved to have the skill of making difficult scientific conceptions understandable and entertaining to the laymen. Throughout his whole career he spent months of every year lecturing and became one of the foremost speakers of his day, counting only Faraday and Huxley as his rivals as popular expositors of science. Using the basement laboratories of the Royal Institution he completed his study of diamagnetism on which his initial scientific reputation was based. Between 1860 and 1870, Tyndall carried out research on radiant heat. 1870-81 produced studies on spontaneous generation and the germ theory of disease. These studies, together with research on glacier motion (1857-60), sound (1867-78) the diffusion of light in the atmosphere (1868-71) and a host of related topics, brought Tyndall a reputation among his scientific peers that rivalled his reputation as a popular lecturer. Tyndall was an evangelist for the cause of science (Burchfield) and he was convinced that traditional British education was outdated and detrimental. He held many roles in order to promote science to the public including as a science examiner, and with Huxley gave 'working men lectures' at the Royal School of Mines. These were so successful that the British Association held a similar series at their annual meetings. Tyndall contributed over the years to science columns in a number of popular middle class periodicals and did much to interest an important element of the Victorian public in the progress of science. His greatest audience was gained ultimately thorough his books and he published more than 16 books and 145 papers in his lifetime. As well as trying to improve the quality of science education and scientific knowledge, Tyndall's youthful interest in theology had turned into open opposition of what he regarded as the anti-intellectual and anti-scientific tenets of Christianity. He was thus an early defender of Darwinian evolution and, like Huxley, he was freely denounced as a proponent of materialism and atheism. Tyndall had many clashes with orthodoxy, the most notorious incident was in Belfast in 1874 when he gave his British Association Presidential address. As a result of his opinions Tyndall was denounced from the pulpits, and pamphlets attacking the 'Belfast address' continued to appear for years afterwards. Tyndall visited the Alps for purposes of recreation in 1849 and began to go there yearly for the purpose of studying the glacier formation. This resulted in 1856 in an expedition with Huxley and produced a joint treatise 'On the Structure and Motion of Glaciers'. For the next four years glaciers became the major focus of Tyndall's scientific interest. In the process he became an accomplished mountaineer and in 1860 he made the first ascent of the Weisshorn. He also published 'Glaciers of the Alps' in this year. In 1859, aged 39, Tyndall began investigating radiant heat and the acoustic properties of the atmosphere. Part of his experimentation included the construction of the first ratio spectrophotometer which he used to measure the absorptive powers of gases such as water vapour, carbonic acid (carbon dioxide), ozone and hydrocarbons. Amongst his most important discoveries were the vast differences in the abilities of "…perfectly colourless and invisible gases and vapours…" to absorb and transmit radiant heat. He noted that oxygen, nitrogen and hydrogen are almost transparent to radiant heat, whilst other gases are quite opaque. Tyndall showed that ozone was an oxygen cluster rather than a hydrogen compound. He was the inventor of the firemans respirator and made other less well-known inventions including better fog-horns. One of his most important inventions, the light pipe, has led to the development of fibre optics. The modern light instrument is known as the gastroscope, which enables internal observations of a patient's stomach without surgery. Tyndall's experiments also showed that molecules of water vapour, carbon dioxide and ozone are the best absorbers of heat radiation and that even in small quantities these gases absorb much more strongly than the atmosphere itself, a phenomenon of great meteorological importance. He concluded that among the constituents of the atmosphere, water vapour is the strongest absorber of radiant heat and is therefore the most important gas controlling the Earth's surface air temperature. He said that without water vapour the Earth's surface would be "held fast in the iron grip of frost". He later speculated how changes in water vapour and carbon dioxide could be related to climate change. In the course of his study into light beams he discovered in 1869 the Tyndall effect - the diffusion of light by large molecules and dust. His suggestion that the sky's blue is due to the scattering of the suns rays by molecules in the atmosphere, a phenomenon which was later explained theoretically by Lord Rayleigh. The bluish plane polarised light scattered in the Tyndall effect is called Tyndall blue and the luminous path formed in the Tyndall effect by the breaking up of the entering light by suspended particles is known as a Tyndall cone. He is credited with the first ever atmospheric pollution measurements using infrared and scattering measurement instruments to monitor the London atmosphere. A role less frequently mentioned is that of a civic scientist or government consultant. Like many other scientists, Tyndall was called on from time-to-time to give expert advice. Areas he covered included investigation of accidents in coalmines and the determination of the causes of boiler explosions in steam engines. His most significant civil labours were in the cause of safe marine navigation. He was on the Board of Trade from 1867 for 14 years, which included lighthouse boards under its jurisdiction and had a profound effect on the safety of navigators around the coasts of England and Ireland. In 1872, Tyndall made a highly profitable lecturing tour throughout the United States which resulted in increased fame as a man of great learning. The proceeds from this tour were put into trust for the advancement of American science. Tyndall remained a bachelor until he was 56, when in 1876 he married Louisa Hamilton. Their marriage, although childless, was an extremely happy one. Although the major part of Tyndall's scientific work was completed by the time he married, he continued his research on spontaneous generation, the germ theory and the propagation of science for many years after and his lectures and essays continued to preach the cause of science. In 1881 he delivered the final blow to the long held idea that germ free air does not lead to food decay. His discovery of organic germ spores in even the most carefully cleaned and filtered air propelled into the current dispute over spontaneous and the germ theory of disease. Tyndall was an outspoken advocate of the work of Louis Pasteur. Tyndall's meticulous research in the laboratory not only refuted the arguments of Pasteur's opponents, but also extended and refined the work of Pasteur himself. By the mid-1880's ill health and the sleeplessness that had plagued Tyndall since his days in Germany began to take their toll and in 1887 he resigned from his professorship at the Royal Institution. He retired to Hampshire, but kept himself occupied with politics campaigning against Gladstone and the Home Rule bill. His health deteriorated and in 1891 he was unable to go to the Alps in the summer for the first time in more than 30 years. As his sleeplessness became worse he experimented more and more with drugs until tragically in 1893 Tyndall died from an overdose of chloral accidentally administered by his wife Louisa. Sources: Much of this biography was based on Burchfield, J. A 1981 John Tyndall - a biographical sketch. In John Tyndall, Essays on a Natural Philosopher Royal Dublin Society. (Book ID 22628) $145.00