Some Applications of Chemistry.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXIX, Issue 1, 3 January 1901, Page 17

Some Applications of Chemistry.

Several important inventions which were devised or brought into common use during the departed century were essentially applications of chemistry. Among these were gas illumination, pretroleum-oil lamps, lucifer matches, and photography. The honor of having first used an installation for lighting by coal gas (or carburetted hydrogen) belongs to Pierre Minkelers, a Professor in the great Belgian Catholic University of Louvain. This distinguished physicist lighted up his lecture room in the University with the new illuminant in 1784— eight years before carburetted hydrogen was used for the first time in Great Britain by William Murdock to light his workshops at Redruth in Cornwall. The first application of coal gas for out-door purposes was made in 1818. Westminster Bridge (London) was then successfully lighted by the new illuminant, and the link-boy's occupation was doomed. The old flint and steel and tinder held their place without serious competition as practically the only means known to civilised peoples of striking a light till the first quarter of the century had gone by. Then, in or about 1827, the friction match was sprung upon the world by John Walker, a chemist of Stockton-on-Tees. It revolutionised the process of firegetting. Phosphorus was added to its composition in 1834. But it was not till 1840 that it became cheap enough to come into general use, and to supplant in great part the old flint and steel and oftentimes damp tinder that were the plague of kitchen-maid and smoker and the cause of more aimless profanity than the barbed-wire fence of a later day. • • • Perhaps no development of the science of chemistry during the nineteenth century has been of such wide and varied application to the arts and to scientific research as that of photography. The camera-obscura, which is so indispensable in the new art, was invented as far back as the sixteenth century by the great Neapolitan Catholic scientist, C iambattista della Porta, who was the founder of the first scientific association, known as the Academia Seeretorutn Xaturcv. Two French Catholic scientists, Niepce ar.d Daguerre, were the first to take permanent photograph?. Niepce's first light-picture was taken at Chalons in 1811. Then invention folds its arms and dozed for a quarter of a century. It woke up with a start in 1839 — the year in which Daguerre perfected the process known as the Daguerrotype. By this process, says Wallace in his Wonderful Century, * permanent portraits were taken by him on silvered plates, and they were so delicate and beautiful that probably nothing in modern photography can surpass them.' Collodion films were introduced in 1850. During the past twenty years improvement has advanced at a breakneck pace. With its enormously increased sensitiveness, the photographic plate will now record with equal phlegm the flight of birds, the rush of racing horses, the lightning-flash, or a Lee-Metford bullet in full spin. The amateur photographer with his kodak is almost as much a feature of the life of our time as was the frilled beau with his hanger in the days of the Second Charles. Altogether, it would be difficult to over-estimate the value of this mira virtus ingmi novwnque monstrum — ' this new marvel of a marvellous age,* as Lko XIII. calls it — in art, astronomy, meteorology, physics, biology, ethnology, history, topography, geography, presswork, and in almost every branch of science and intellectual pursuits.