Life was a gas with Humphry
QUESTION Did Humphry Davy administer laughing gas to the audience at his lectures?
HUMPHRY Davy (1778-1829) was a celebrated chemist and inventor. He was the first person to describe the properties of nitrous oxide, which is still extensively used in anaesthesia.
Davy and his friends used the gas as a stimulant, resulting in euphoria and heightened imagination. He personally coined the term ‘laughing gas’.
One of his friends was Samuel Taylor Coleridge, an eminent poet of the Romantic Movement and author of The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner, who inhaled the gas with Davy and commented on the subsequent euphoria.
He reported that while he was inhaling the gas, ‘towards the last, I could not avoid, nor indeed felt any wish to avoid, beating the ground with my feet; and after the mouth-piece was removed, I remained for a few seconds motionless, in great extacy [sic]’.
Davy was an early member of the Pneumatic Institution in Bristol, which was formed to exploit the newly discovered respiratory gases in medical practice. He was also one of the first professors to lecture at the Royal Institution in London. His lectures there were legendary; not only was he supremely eloquent, but women thronged to them, keen to see the handsome chemist.
When he lectured on respiration, those who wished to breathe nitrous oxide after the lecture were invited to do so. The spectators were most amused by the results. On June 20, 1801, one man was so transported and ‘so reluctant to leave heaven and earth’ that the ‘breathing-bag’ had to be forcibly removed from him. Such was the spectacle of ‘laughing gas’ that, shortly after Davy’s death, Dr Thomas Thompson complained that Davy’s discovery of the gas had made him more celebrated than all the merit of his subsequent achievements.
These were considerable. A champion of the scientific method, Davy discovered the elements sodium, potassium and calcium, and he was the first person to isolate magnesium, boron and barium. He invented an early form of battery, and delivered lectures on tanning, geology and agricultural chemistry. Davy also saved many lives by developing the miner’s safety lamp.
QUESTION Why were estate cars so-called? Why were they once referred to as ‘shooting brakes’?
A BRAKE in the 19th century was a light carriage used for breaking in horses to carriage work – the spellings ‘break’ and ‘brake’ were interchangeable at the time and the latter stuck.
These vehicles were modified to carry luggage and were known as a ‘luggage-brake’ or ‘station waggon’, the latter reflecting the purpose of transporting people and luggage between country estates and train stations. The ‘shooting brake’ was used on country estates; it had seats for the shooters, gun racks and room for dogs, guns and lunch. So vehicles tended to be found on gentlemen’s estates; ‘estate car’ was used when makers of motorised versions sought a wider market.
Marc Danielson, Bridport, Dorset.
QUESTION What caused the Great Sheep Panic of 1888 in southern England?
NOBODY knows for sure what triggered the remarkable events of November 3, 1888. A 1921 investigation for the journal Nature suggested it was a group panic caused by a profoundly dark night, punctuated with lightning.
In a letter to the editor of the Hardwicke’s Science-Gossip magazine, two local farmers described the incident: ‘At a time as near eight o’clock as possible the tens of thousands of sheep folded in the large sheep-breeding districts, north, east, and west of Reading were taken with a sudden fright, jumping their hurdles, escaping from the fields, and running hither and thither; in fact, there must for some time have been a perfect stampede.
‘Early on Sunday, the shepherds found the animals under hedges and in the roads, panting as if they had been terror-stricken. The extent of the occurrence may be judged when we mention that every large farmer from Wallingford on the one hand, to Twyford on the other, has reported that his sheep were similarly frightened, and it is also noteworthy that the hill-country north of the Thames seems to have been principally affected.’ Remarkably, five years later, on December 4, 1893, a similar panic occurred in the northern and middle parts of Oxfordshire, extending into adjoining parts of the counties of Warwick, Gloucester and Berkshire.
Sheep have an intense instinct to gather together in flocks. They sense that there is strength in numbers, and running in a large, tight group away from a predator can help prevent any of their number from getting caught.
Naturalist Oliver Vernon Aplin was fascinated by these incidents and concluded in his 1921 Nature article that ‘a thick and heavy darkness’, such that ‘a man could not see his own hand’, caused by an ‘extraordinary black cloud travelling from north-west to south-east, which appeared to be rolling along the ground’, along with bursts of lightning, had spooked the animals en masse.
It seems remarkable that this would happen to multiple flocks at once. Local farmers speculated there may have been an earth tremor in the night. An extraterrestrial encounter has also been posited by the more imaginative.
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