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Home The Industrial Revolution and Social Progress, 1750-1909 Scientific Progress after 1815 Scientific Progress; Part 5 |
Scientific Progress; Part 5We have already alluded to the changes effected in agriculture and the cotton industry in the eighteenth century, and we have no space to enter in detail into the revolutions effected in every industry during the nineteenth century by an infinite variety of inventions and the development of machinery worked by steam and electricity. Nor can we do more than allude to other discoveries and inventions which have expanded our interests, like photography, or increased our knowledge, like the spectroscope, or saved us time in writing and reading letters, like the typewriter. Other inventions have increased the conveniences of life, such, for instance, as the use of gas (It was first made popular by the successful lighting of Westminster Bridge in the year of Vittoria (1813)), and later of electricity; or the invention of a new burner for lamps, or of phosphorus matches, the one a few years before and the other a few years after Queen Victoria's accession. Nor can we do more than allude to the wonderful developments of medical science. Of these the most striking, perhaps, are the introduction of anesthetics about 1848, which made the most severe operations painless, and the use, in 1865, of antiseptics, which, it is calculated, has reduced the deaths from serious amputations from 45 per cent to some 12 per cent, besides rendering possible numberless operations never before attempted. Nor can we dwell here on the revolutions in scientific thought due, for instance, to the doctrine of the conservation of energy, and above all to the theory of natural selection propounded by Darwin in 1859 in the Origin of Species - a theory which has profoundly affected man's speculations in every domain of thought. |
Chronology |
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