Category: Discoveries

Yorkshireman Joseph Priestley (1733-1804) was a skilled experimental chemist, among other occupations, and in 1774 he made some extraordinary discoveries by heating red mercuric oxide using apparatus he had designed himself. He isolated no less than ten gases (‘airs’), including oxygen, although he named it ‘dephlogisticated air’, as per theories of the time. Their modern names are:-

1.  Oxygen (O)
2.  Nitrogen (N) – ‘phlogisticated air’
3. Nitric Oxide (NO)
4. Nitrogen Dioxide (NO2)
5. Nitrous Oxide (N2O)
6. Hydrogen Chloride (HCl)
7. Ammonia (NH3)
8. Sulphur Dioxide (SO2)
9. Silicon Tetrafluoride (SiF4)
10. Carbon Monoxide (CO)

The following year, Priestley generously showed his method to Antoine Lavoisier in Paris and it was the Frenchman who developed the accepted theory on oxygen, which he also named. This was to revolutionise the field of chemistry. Meanwhile, Priestley remained stubbornly attached to the ‘phlogiston’ (Greek: burned) theory purporting to explain combustion and corrosion, even though it was superseded by 1800.

Nevertheless, Priestley made significant progress in the understanding of electricity and chemistry, and published six volumes entitled ‘Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air’, for which he was awarded the prestigious Copley Medal. Believing in the health benefits of natural elements, he strove to apply them in practical ways to improve sanitation and hygiene.

(Images LtoR: Joseph Priestley / Public domain, reproduction of Priestley’s apparatus by Science Museum Group Librarian at Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0)

The founder of the prestigious magazine ‘Nature’ was Warwickshire-born Sir Norman Lockyer (1836-1920) and its first edition in 1869 includes his description of his own discovery of the so-called ‘noble’ gas, helium, the year before. Such an achievement was remarkable for a man with no formal scientific education, but rather a thirst for knowledge, a telescope and a spectroscope. He became a member of the Royal Astronomical Society at age 25.

Lockyer was particularly interested in the Sun’s fiery corona and ‘prominences’, which he called the chromosphere. He observed these during solar eclipses and would travel far and wide at great expense and effort to observe as many eclipses as possible. In between times he used his method for blocking out the sunlight by using seven prisms positioned radially on a spectroscope fitted in a refracting telescope.

This enabled Lockyer to discern spectral lines of hydrogen and sodium, along with an unknown element, which he named ‘helium’ after Helios, the sun-god. Helium was later found to exist on Earth as well, albeit in much smaller amounts than in the celestial arena. Lockyer was the Director of the Solar Physics Observatory in 1885-1913 and there are craters named after him on the Moon and Mars.

(Images: Lockyer & his spectroscope both from Wellcome Collection at Wikimedia Commons / CC BY 4.0, solar chromospheric and coronal spectra by Bob Fosbury at Flickr.com / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

The Eddington Limit (or Luminosity) is a measurement of the the maximum brightness of, say, a star before it starts to blow apart. It can be calculated as

4πGcMmp / σT erg/s

(where G=gravity, c=speed of light, M=mass, mp=mass of a proton and σT=Thomson cross-section), thereby making M (mass) the only or main variable. Indeed, a drastic simplification might approximate to: M to the power 3.5.

The Limit was derived by Sir Arthur Eddington (1882-1944) from Cumbria in 1926. It can be applied to all sorts of celestial objects that are in ‘hydrostatic equilibrium’, i.e. the gravitational pull inwards is balanced by the forces of radiation and gases pushing outwards. The Eddington Limit can be exceeded for a short time, as in an explosion of some sort, but any longer and the outer layers of the object will start to come away in solar winds.

Eddington was a pioneer of astrophysics from a young age and spent most of his career at Cambridge researching, writing and teaching. He was Director of Cambridge Observatory from 1914, having been a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society since 1906. His discovery led to a greater understanding of the life cycle of the universe.

(Images LtoR: Prof. Sir A.S. Eddington at garystockbridge617.get.archive.net / Public domain, & the Vega star by CSky65 at Flickr.com / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

At the time that secretin was discovered, post-Industrial Revolution, scientific materialists were encouraging the idea of a living body being just another machine that could be explained by physics. Brothers-in-law Sir William Maddock Bayliss (1860-1924) from Staffordshire and Londoner Ernest Henry Starling (1866-1927) were the medical researchers who, in 1902, made a breakthrough which conversely hinted that there is much more unfathomable ingenuity to it than that.

They set up a gruesome experiment at University College London whereby they observed and deduced that eating food stimulates the upper gastrointestinal tract to emit what they called secretin, a chemical messenger composed of strings of amino acids, into the bloodstream, which then travels only to the pancreas (and nowhere else), where it in turn stimulates the production of digestive juices, then disappears.

Bayliss and Starling published their findings under the heading ‘The Mechanism of Pancreatic Secretion’  (1902), thereby founding the study of hormones, of which secretin was the first to be identified, although it took until the 1960s for it to be isolated. In 1905 they coined the word ‘hormone’ from the Greek word meaning ‘that which sets in motion’ and shed light on how the blood and lymph are part of the body’s communication channels.

(Images: Internet Archive Book Images at Flickr.com / Public domain, Bayliss & Starling [cropped from family group] by Wellcome Images at Wikimedia Commons / CC BY 4.0)

Louise Brown, born in Lancashire in 1978, and Alastair MacDonald, born in Glasgow six months later, were the world’s first ‘test-tube babies’. This was the long-awaited breakthrough in the research conducted by Oxfordshire-born Patrick Steptoe (1913-88), Yorkshireman Sir Robert Edwards (1925-2013) and their assistant, Jean Purdy (1945-85) from Cambridgeshire. They had finally discovered a method for inducing sperm to fertilise an egg in the laboratory and after re-introducing the embryo into the mother’s womb, for a normal pregnancy to follow.

Steptoe, a pioneer of keyhole surgery, and physiologist Edwards had persevered with their experiments for 10 years despite a lack of funding and opposition from their peers and the media, but this changed after their achievement. Even with a fairly low success rate, there have still been more than 8 million babies born through in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) and reports of the parents’ overwhelming happiness and relief soon replaced those criticising the doctors for interfering with nature.

In 1980 they opened the very first IVF fertility clinic, Bourn Hall in Cambridgeshire. Louise and Alastair both make the occasional visit there, e.g. on special birthdays which, of course, coincide with IVF anniversaries. Edwards alone lived long enough to receive the recognition of a Nobel Prize in 2010 for IVF’s development.

(Image: Vera Kratochvil at publicdomainpictures.net / CC0)

Mathematician and physicist Sir James Chadwick (1891-1974) from Cheshire discovered the third type of sub-atomic particle, namely neutrons, for which he received the 1935 Nobel Prize in Physics. Negatively charged electrons had been found in 1897 by Sir J.J. Thomson (1856-1940) and positively charged protons in 1919 by Lord Ernest Rutherford (1871-1937). Chadwick was both a student and, subsequently, research associate of Rutherford and, for over a decade, resolutely explored Rutherford’s suggestion that there must be a neutral, uncharged particle as well, to make up the known atomic number and weight.

The technology was not sufficiently advanced to prove this until 1932, by which time cloud chambers and particle accelerators had been developed at the University of Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory ~ home at one time or another to all three of Thomson, Rutherford and Chadwick.

Chadwick was able to set up an experiment to bombard the element beryllium with alpha particles and break it apart to observe the scattered protons’ velocity. He calculated the properties of neutral rays sailing on regardless through various types of barrier and concluded that they were the neutrons, with atomic mass almost identical to that of protons. This was a key moment in the new field of nuclear science, for good and bad.

(Images: photos Public Domain & Rutherford-Bohr atomic model: nshepheard at Flickr.com / CC BY-SA 2.0)

The first dinosaur bone to be identified as such, albeit 166 years later, was dug up in 1676 on Sir Thomas Pennyston’s Oxfordshire estate and given by him to Professor Robert Plot (1640-96) at the University of Oxford. Plot included a drawing of the giant thigh bone in ‘The Natural History of Oxfordshire’ which he published in 1677. He imagined it to be human but it was later claimed to belong to a megalosaurus (‘the great fossil lizard’), a name invented by Dr. William Buckland (1784-1855/6) also at the University of Oxford.

The extraordinary finds of Mary Anning (1799-1847) on part of the 95-mile Jurassic coastline stretching from Devon to Dorset, including whole skeletons of ichthyosaurs, inspired enormous interest in fossil-hunting, even though it was seen as controversial in theological circles.

Lancashire-born Sir Richard Owen (1804-92) devised the name ‘dinosauria‘ (‘terrible lizards’), commonly called dinosaurs, in 1842, to classify the growing number of extinct species of mostly large reptiles and birds. There are many dinosaur museums around the UK, including the Mary Anning Wing of Lyme Regis Museum, but perhaps the most famous is London’s Natural History Museum with its dinosaur gallery. From 1979 to 2017 a replica of ‘Dippy’ the diplodocus was the first sight on entering the building.

(Image of a mantellisaurus skeleton named after Sussex-born Gideon Mantell (1790-1852): bryan at Flickr.com / CC BY-SA 2.0)

With air travel increasing in popularity in the early 1950s, scientists were faced with the new problem of jet noise. Nowadays this is called ‘noise pollution’ as it is judged to be detrimental if excessive or prolonged. Sound levels are monitored at all airports and the field of aeroacoustics has thereby progressed hand-in-hand with the aircraft industry.

The very first scientific paper on aeroacoustics was published by Sir Michael James Lighthill (1924-98) in 1952 on the theory of sound radiated by a turbulent flow over surfaces. This gifted mathematician took only a fortnight to complete the maths, but 16 months to decide how best to explain his theory in words. Ironically, though an expert on fluid dynamics, Lighthill died swimming around Sark Island in the English Channel, attempting to repeat the feat he had accomplished several times before.

In fact, Professor Geoffrey Lilley (1919-2015) from Middlesex earned the accolade of ‘the Father of Aeroacoustics’ for his work on sufficiently reducing the noise from Concorde to meet New York’s strict regulations. Professor John Ffowcs-Williams (1935-2020) from Conwy was another who, using Lighthill’s ‘aeroacoustics analogy’, tackled Concorde’s take-off noise. He and his student David Hawkings subsequently introduced the Ffowcs-Willlams-Hawkings Equation, central to solutions for reducing propeller noise.

(Image of aircraft approaching Heathrow: Matt Kieffer at Flickr.com / CC BY-SA 2.0)

Lancashire-born William Lassell (1799-1880) grew up in Liverpool within a clock-making family, acquiring the precision engineering skills needed for his lifelong passion ~ astronomy. Financed by the profits of his brewery, he built a succession of increasingly large telescopes in his workshop. In 1842 he began recording new sightings through his 9″ telescope, but it was with his 24″ reflector telescope, constructed in 1845, that he discovered Triton, the largest of Neptune’s 13 moons, in 1846 (the others were found more than a century later).

Neptune itself had only just been discovered and Lassell’s achievement greatly enhanced his reputation, culminating in his Presidency of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1870-72. Meanwhile, he co-discovered Hyperion, a moon of Saturn, in 1848; co-discovered Saturn’s Crepe Ring in 1850; and discovered Ariel and Umbriel, two moons of Uranus, in 1851.

He invented a polishing machine for his speculum mirrors and pioneered the equatorial mount that helps maintain fixed focus. He built a 48″ telescope in 1858 and moved everything to Malta for some years for better viewing under her cloudless skies. On his return he bought a house near the River Thames in Berkshire ~ the street is now named Lassell Gardens. There are two craters, one asteroid and a ring of Neptune also named after him.

(Image of Triton’s supposed icy surface looking towards a blue Neptune: NASA via picryl.com / CC0)

Sir W.M. Flinders Petrie (1853-1942) did not know his grandfather, Lincolnshire-born Captain Matthew Flinders (1774-1814), who was the first to survey Australia’s coastline, but he certainly seemed to inherit his attention to detail and taste for adventure. Born in Kent, the young Petrie was home-schooled and learnt surveying and trigonometry from his father and his books.

He became fascinated by the Egyptian pyramids and felt compelled to begin making field trips to English ancient monumental sites, in preparation for his ultimate wish to visit and study Giza. He published ‘Stonehenge: Plans, Description and Theories’ in 1880 and this was highly regarded for Petrie’s explanation of the structure’s geometry. He then began 40 years of Egyptian archaeology.

Petrie’s meticulous methods of excavation and insistence on cataloguing everything found were pioneering. He developed a system of identifying the chronology of pottery pieces according to their design and depth in the soil. His discoveries included parts of a previously unknown statue of Ramses II in 1884. He worked at over 30 different sites in Egypt and surrounding countries and found numerous Greek and Roman artefacts too, although he did not place much academic value on these. London’s Petrie Museum has the second largest ancient Egyptian collection in the UK.

(Images LtoR: One of Petrie’s finds at Wikimedia Commons / CC BY 4.0 & snl.no / Public Domain)

West Kennet Long Barrow (WKLB), near the Avebury stone circles in Wiltshire, is one of 180 barrows in southern England. At 328ft. it is the second longest after its neighbour, East Kennet Long Barrow. However, WKLB has been more extensively excavated and much has been written and debated about the functions of its five chambers, which may have included shamanic rituals, rites of passage, childbirth, cremations and acoustic effects.

Early sketches of this 5,000-year-old mound show boulders set all around its perimeter and especially at its eastern entrance, which appears to have been deliberately filled in and blocked at around 2000BC. Local farmers purloined some of these stones but in 1859, when Dr. John Thurnam (1810-73) attempted the first excavation, the farmer in whose field WKLB stood forbade him from removing anything but skeletons. Thurnam found one chamber but could not proceed any further.

In 1955-56 Professor Stuart Piggott (1910-96) did have permission to conduct a proper excavation. He and his team discovered four more rooms and a central passageway, with many bones, skulls and pieces of pottery. The mound was originally covered in gleaming white chalk and must have been a spiritual and ancestral icon for a once-nomadic clan that settled in the area.

(Top image: Rebecca A Wills at geograph.org.uk / CC BY-SA 2.0)