Condition: BRAND NEW
ISBN: 9780745636757
Year: 2009
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons (UK)
Pages: 272


Description:
Of all the inventions of the nineteenth century, the scientist is
one of the most striking. In revolutionary France the science
student, taught by men active in research, was born; and a
generation later, the graduate student doing a PhD emerged in
Germany. In 1833 the word ?scientist? was coined; forty
years later science (increasingly specialised) was a becoming a
profession. Men of science rivalled clerics and critics as sages;
they were honoured as national treasures, and buried in state
funerals. Their new ideas invigorated the life of the mind.
Peripatetic congresses, great exhibitions, museums, technical
colleges and laboratories blossomed; and new industries based on
chemistry and electricity brought prosperity and power, economic
and military. Eighteenth-century steam engines preceded
understanding of the physics underlying them; but electric
telegraphs and motors were applied science, based upon painstaking
interpretation of nature. The ideas, discoveries and inventions of
scientists transformed the world: lives were longer and healthier,
cities and empires grew, societies became urban rather than
agrarian, the local became global. And by the opening years of the
twentieth century, science was spreading beyond Europe and North
America, and women were beginning to be visible in the ranks of
scientists.

Bringing together the people, events, and discoveries of this
exciting period into a lively narrative, this book will be
essential reading both for students of the history of science and
for anyone interested in the foundations of the world as we know it
today.