Stories of inventors and their inventions: Alessandro Volta and the Voltaic pile
We all read stories about the innovators of today and how their products or services make a difference. In this series of publications, we shed light on a side that remains often dark and unknown to the public: their patented inventions and what impact they have had on other innovators across society. We did the research and summarized our findings.Credited as the inventor of the electric battery, Alessandro Giuseppe Antonio Anastasio Volta was an Italian physicist, chemist, and pioneer of electricity and power. In 1799, he invented the ‘Voltaic pile’ to p...
A. R. Wallace Is Evolution’s Last Man Standing
American zoologist T. D. A. Cockerell, writing for The Dial on April 16, 1911, reviewed Alfred Russel Wallace’s then-recently released The World of Life. He wrote cautiously but approvingly.
Claude Bernard, statistics, and comparative trials.
Claude Bernard (1813-1878)’s Introduction à l’étude de la médecine expérimentale (1865) is commonly misinterpreted as criticizing the use of statistics in medicine and the quantified research practice that would later lead to clinical epidemiology. There are indeed statements in the Introduction that apparently lend support to such interpretation. For example, we can read that: “In a word, if based on statistics, medicine can never be anything but a conjectural science” (Bernard 1865, p 197; 1957, p 139). But these statements are qualified by others demonstrating that Bernard advocated the ...
Charles Dickens: Six things he gave the modern world
With the 200th birthday of Charles Dickens quickly approaching, and an entire series of events planned, what is the lasting legacy of his work and his causes?Charles Dickens is one of the most important writers of the 19th Century. But his influence goes far beyond just literature. Many of his phrases, characters and ideas have engrained themselves in modern culture.Two centuries on, what are the things still seen today that Dickens first offered us in his writing?...
Eyre Supply
There is something about the Brontë sisters that is enduringly fascinating, something about their strange, gifted, and woefully abbreviated lives (none of them lived to forty) that reads like the stuff of myth. Perhaps it’s the combination of great personal privation and great artistic willfulness, the mixture of geographic isolation and literary renown, that lends their story an elemental note of warring forces both within and without. To think of these three motherless and conspicuously inbred young women—Charlotte, Emily, and Anne—living off in a parsonage on the Yorkshire moors together...
