THE ROYAL INSTITUTION

See Also: CHEFS Molecular Gastronomy; ELECTRICITY; LEARNED SOCIETIES; A SOUFFLÉ CHEF OF SUBSTANCE

Benjamin Thompson was born and raised in humble circumstances in Massachusetts. He proved to have a great talent for ingratiating himself with people who had power and influence. He also proved to be an adept practical scientist. He was capable of examining a problem, appreciating its nature, and then developing an appropriate remedy. He was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society. During the American War of Independence, he fought on the Loyalist side. Following the return of peace, he left his native land. He spent a brief time in Britain before travelling in Europe. The Elector of Bavaria was seeking to modernise his electorate. He invited Thompson to enter his service. The American returned to Britain where King George III granted him permission to do so. Thompson proved to be a most capable administrator. During the 1780s and 1790s reforms he initiated touched upon numerous aspects of Bavaria. The elector demonstrated his appreciation of the man by having the Holy Roman Empire confer the title of Count von Rumford upon him.¹

In his scientific work Rumford had a particular interest in heat and convection. His study of convection currents led to him realising that air trapped within a fabric offered an excellent means of insulation. He developed a stove that was ultimately to give rise to the kitchen range. His researches played a role in allowing the subject of thermodynamics to develop.

Rumford's success in Bavaria had derived in large part from his adeptness at applying scientific research to practical matters. Therefore, he responded to his predicament by staying on in the metropolis and promoting the establishment of an institution that manufacturers could use as a forum for exchanging technical information with one another and thereby hastening the rate of technological progress. He persuaded a number of landowners to provide the financial means for the body's establishment. He did this by indicating that it would seek to develop more effective methods for crop cultivation.

The following year the Royal Institution opened its doors in Albemarle Street. As matters were to turn out, manufacturers preferred to keep their own particular trade secrets to themselves. Therefore, the new body did not turn out to be as devoted to the practical application of science as the count may have envisaged its being.

Rumford s management of the Institution proved to be autocratic and inflexible. As a result, he engendered ill-will towards himself. The body's great stroke of good fortune was that in 1801 Humphry Davy was appointed to be one of its lecturers. The same year the count left Britain to live in Europe. Davy's first course of talks was on tanning. They laid out what was the current best practice in the industry rather than furnishing any technical advancement. The following year he gave a series of lectures on chemistry. These created a sensation. On days when he was delivering one of them, Albemarle Street became subject to a one-way traffic system. This was in order that it should not become clogged by the attendees coaches. The Cornishman was appointed to be the Institution's Professor of Chemistry.

News of Alessandro Volta's research prompted Davy to consider how electricity could be applied to chemistry. By using an electrical current to decompose pure water into oxygen and hydrogen, he concluded that electricity and chemical affinity were facets of the same force. In 1807 he broke down caustic potash by applying a current to it. This led to him being the first person to isolate potassium. Three years later he identified chlorine. He used the fact that sulphuric acid and muriatic acid do not contain any elements in common to overturn Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier's theory that acidity had a material basis.

Michael Faraday had been apprenticed to a bookbinder. He read some of the books that he had to fasten. As a result, he developed a fascination with chemistry. He attended a series of Royal Institution lectures that Davy gave. During these the youth took notes. He bound them and presented the result to the scientist. Davy's response to this gesture was condescending. However, subsequently, a laboratory explosion damaged the scientist's eyesight. He remembered Faraday and had him employed as his helper.

Davy stepped down from his Chair of Chemistry in 1813. He was to continue to be closely associated with the institution in an honorary capacity. His amanuensis accompanied him on a prolonged tour of the laboratories of Napoleonic Europe. Subsequently, the youth's official role within the Institution was to act as an assistant to Davy's successor as Professor.

In 1815 Davy received a letter from a County Durham clergyman that asked him to do something about the explosions that occurred in coalmines. The scientist proved that firedamp was in fact methane. He then invented the Davy lamp. This was a safety lamp that used a piece of gauze to conduct away the heat of the flame. Thus, there was no opportunity for a body of the inflammable gas to reach its ignition point. Faraday assisted him in the creation of this device. Davy chose not to patent it. This decision helped to promote its speedy adoption during the course of 1816.

In 1820 Davy's scientific eminence was recognised when he was elected to be the President of the Royal Society. The same year the discovery of electromagnetism by Hans Christian Oersted triggered a craze amongst European scientists for conducting electromagnetic experiments: William Hyde Wollaston was one of those who participated in the fad; Andr -Marie Amp re developed a mathematically-based theory that sought to describe the subject. Faraday was invited to produce a review article of the publications that had appeared on the topic. As a result, he repeated many of the experiments. This led to his discovery that the interaction of magnetism and electricity could create continuous motion - the phenomenon of electromagnetic rotation. This was something Amp re's model had been unable to predict.

During the early 1820s Faraday and Davy's relationship with one another deteriorated. The latter was aware that Wollaston had been Sir Joseph Banks's preferred successor at the Royal Society and that the man's decision not to press for the post had cleared the way for his own nomination. Therefore, he may have felt that Faraday's electromagnetic researches had been impolitic. In addition, what the Cornishman regarded as the Londoner's premature publication of a discovery about how chlorine could be rendered into a liquid form prompted a spat between them. In 1824 Faraday stood for election to the Royal Society even though Davy had made it clear that he believed that his assistant did not yet deserve the distinction. The younger man was chosen to become a Fellow.

The pair continued to work in association with one another. That Faraday's principal discoveries were not to be made until after Davy had died may have derived in large part from the fact that he had very little time in which to conduct his own research. Instead, he complied with Davy's requirement that he should perform various technical functions, notably one to do with the production of optical glass. These serviced Davy's administrative imperialism rather than advancing fundamental science. One lasting achievement of Faraday's that dates from the final Davy era was his establishment in 1826 of the Institution's Christmas lectures for children.¹

Oersted had conjectured that electromagnetic induction existed. In 1829 Davy died. Faraday promptly shed his directed labours and started to focus on proving whether or not the Danish scientist had been right. In 1831 the Londoner proved that the phenomenon did exist; Amp re had almost certainly observed it nine years before but the straightjacket of his own mathematical approach had prevented him from recognising it. Faraday s discovery opened up an avenue of research that made the practical use of electricity possible. He went on to prove that the different ways in which it occurred were all instances of the same phenomenon. He then overturned Davy s prevailing theory of electrochemistry, proving that action occurred throughout a solution and not just at the poles. This work led to the creation of a vocabulary for the field that included words such as anode , cathode , electrode , and electrolysis .²

Faraday continued to devote himself to trying to better understand the nature of electrical energy. In 1836 he created the Faraday Cage. This device led to him developing the belief that electricity was a power that passed between neighbouring particles. This opinion was so far ahead of his contemporaries that his work might well have been dismissed had he not already proven himself to be the foremost researcher in the field.

By the start of the 1840s the scientist had formed the view that magnetism was a universal phenomenon and not one that was just associated with nickel and iron. However, proving this to be the case was quite another matter. As a result, for several years he doubted whether he was still capable of producing original research.

In 1844 Faraday gave a lecture in which he challenged the prevailing Daltonian atomic theory. He did this by pointing out the way in which space in non-conductors acts as an insulator but in metals it is a conductor. During the following year he investigated whether or not a wide range of materials were affected by magnetism.

Faraday and William Thomson had a discussion about polarised light. As a direct result, the former conducted a set of experiments that led him first to discover the magneto-optical effect and then to conclude that generally magnetism affects matter. In 1846 he made his findings known and revealed his new opinions about space and matter. In the wake of these insights, the field theory of electromagnetism was to emerge. He was to overcome his wariness of using mathematical techniques and co-operated with Thomson and James Clerk Maxwell in their development of the subject. During the 1850s and 1860s it was applied practically in the development of an undersea telegraphic network. Thereby, it became possible for communications to be sent around the world in a matter of minutes.

In 2023 researchers revealed that Davy had written hundreds of poems in his scientific notebooks.

Location: 21 Albemarle Street, W1S 4BS (red, brown)

168 Brompton Road, SW3 1HW. The count s home. (purple, blue)

Website: www.rigb.org

¹. Rumford in Massachusetts had been a town where Thompson had worked as schoolmaster and had started his social ascent. In 1765 the settlement had been renamed Concord.

². Rumford 's extant legacy in Bavaria includes Rumford's English Garden in Munich.

³. The Royal Institution Christmas lectures for children are televised. For many people this is the best-known facet of the Institution.

⁴. In 1833 Faraday was appointed as the Institution's inaugural Fullerian Professor of Chemistry & Physiology. John Fuller had furnished the money for the chair with the express proviso that Faraday had to be its inaugural holder.

John Tyndall

In 1824 and 1827 Jospeh Fourier (1768-1830), a French mathematician and natural philosopher, published two articles that mooted the possibility of the greenhouse effect. John Tyndall s interest in atmospheric conditions in the Alps, where he mountaineered, led to him to him conducting experiments in 1859 that showed how CO₂ and water vapour absorbed heat. They showed the role of C0₂ in the atmosphere. He isolated oxygen and nitrogen. He appreciated that they could conveyed heat. He then reintroduced CO₂ and water vapour. In the atmosphere, they absorb infrared radiation, therefore, about half of the heat that enters it does not make it to the Earth. Water vapour also helped to retain heat.

The field had been identified by Eunice Foote (1819-1888), an American woman, three years earlier. Her paper, Circumstances Effecting The Heat of The Sun's Rays, was delivered at the A.A.A.S. conference by Professor Joseph Henry, the head of The Smithsonian. Subsequently, it was published in The Annual of Scientific Discovery. She evacuated two glass jars, one she filled with air and the other the CO₂ and then placed them in sunlight. The CO₂ one heated up more quickly than the air one and took longer to cool down. She appreciated that if there were large quantities of the CO₂ in the atmosphere then there might be adverse ramifications and went on to describe the possibility of global warming. However, Tyndall spent time in the United States and was a friend of Professor Henry. In his paper he had claimed that the field was virgin.

Professionally, G.S. Callendar was a steam engineer. As a hobby he studied climatology. In 1938 he set out the Callendar Effect, a simple chemical formula for how CO₂ caused climate change.

See Also: WEATHER Blue Skies

'Phenomenon' Young

Thomas Young trained to be a physician at the universities of Edinburgh, G ttingen, and Cambridge. One of the principal reasons that he went on to make such a large input to contemporary scholarship was that, despite, his great medical learning, he had a poor bedside manner. As a result, his medical practice never flourished, leaving him with large spans of time in which to pursue his interests. He could afford to do this since a legacy he had received in 1797 had made him independently wealthy. Phenomenon Young became one of the great polymaths of his age. In 1801 the Royal Institution appointed him as its Professor of Natural Philosophy.

Young made substantial contributions to a wide range of subjects. However, most of these had a small impact so that, with the passage of time, his name became increasingly obscure. In physics he argued that light travelled in waves;¹ in engineering he devised Young's modulus as a means for assessing elasticity; in medicine, he devised Young's rule for determining the adjustment of the dosage of a drug so that it may be given to children; in linguistics he coined the term Indo-European and played an essential role in enabling the Rosetta Stone to be deciphered; and in music he devised Young s temperament as means for tuning harpsichords. Over the years 1816-25 he wrote 63 entries for the Encyclopaedia Britannica. However, he did decline to write entries on three subjects - stone-cutting, mining, and blasting and boring. The impact of his work was diminished by the fact that he often published anonymously. He also gave explanations of his ideas that were spare to the point of obscurity.

Location: 48 Welbeck Street, W1G 9XL (red, brown)

See Also: EGYPTOLOGY The Rosetta Stone; SHERLOCK HOLMES; REFERENCE WORKS; WEATHER Blue Skies

¹. Henry Brougham, who had his own mistaken ideas about light, used a series of articles in the Edinburgh Review to attack Young's work.

Sir Geoffrey Taylor

There was a question of whether light was a wave or a particle.

Young demonstrated that when a light fell upon two slits, an interference pattern of light and dark patches could be seen upon a viewing screen. This was taken to reveal that light behaved like a wave. Einstein argued that light was composed of numerous particles (photons).

Sir Geoffrey Taylor wished to go on a long summer sailing trip. He recreated Young's experiment in order to test Einstein's theory. He sought to see what happened if a photon passed through two slits. He reduced the intensity of his light source to a low level so that only single photons were produced at a time. He replaced the screen with a photographic plate. The experiment had to be left alone for hundreds of continuous hours at a stretch.

Upon his return he found that a single photon had been able to create a pattern. The photon appeared to have been able to pass through both slits at once and effectively interfere with itself , i.e. it had been in two places at once. Light was both a wave and a particle. The first experimental evidence of what came to be called quantum mechanics.

He proved that it was both.

The Professor Button

The chemist David Philips spent a decade as the Royal Institution's Wolfson Professor of Natural History. He used to give distinguished visitors a tour of the building. In the Chemistry lab the laser was impressive. The people who used it in their research became tired of him detuning it while trying to show it off to his guests. They rigged up a Professor Button on the laser. It was not connected to anything.

David Backhouse 2024