The traditional oil paints popular up to the 19th Century were made by grinding pigments with linseed, walnut or poppy seed oil – but while they produced stunning hues, their drying time meant that it could could take months or even years to complete a painting if several layers of colour were used.
Artists like JMW Turner understandably didn’t want to spend their lives watching paint dry, so they collaborated with chemists to produce gels that could be added to oil-based paints to shorten drying times.
The supramolecular structure of the gel is revealed by freeze fracture electron microscopy. Aa frozen specimen is fractured along natural planes, making an impression or replica of the exposed surface,then examined using transmission electron microscopy. Credit: LAMS (CNRS/UPMC)
They found that lead, in its acetate form, is essential to the formation of these gels. But other questions remained – how do they bind with the paint? How do they age?
The researchers reconstituted the original paint formulas and were able to reproduce the gels using lead and mastic to study their rheological properties, such as flow and deformation behaviour. They found that even minute amounts of the gels would modify the characteristics of the paint, yielding superior elastic properties.
On canvas, the consistency of gels and gel-paint mixtures differs greatly from that of paint alone, which spreads without retaining volume. Credit: Hélène Pasco, LAMS (CNRS, UPMC)
Using spectroscopic techniques, they defined the molecular interactions of the hybrid organic-inorganic gels and the mechanisms of the gelling process. They found that the lead not only catalysed the gelling process but contributed to the structure of the medium itself.
The challenge, now, is to understand how the lead binds with the resin and which conditions are best and worst for their conservation.
1. The American Edward Goodrich Acheson heated a mixture of clay – aluminium silicate, and powdered coke (carbon) in an iron bowl with a carbon arc, and found shiny hexagonal crystals attached to the carbon electrode. Acheson eventually patented this method for producing powdered silicon carbide (SiC), a compound of silicon and carbon in 1893.
2. The mineral form of silicon carbide is called moissanite and gets its name from Dr Ferdinand Henry Moissan, who first discovered it in the Canyon Diablo Crater in Arizona in 1904.
3. Silicon carbide crystals can be strongly birefringent, meaning the crystals exhibit different refractive indices down different axes.
4. SiC powder production involves the Acheson resistance furnace, produced by the Lely Process. This method creates large single crystals by sublimating silicon carbide powder to form a high-temperature species called silicon dicarbide (SiC2) and disilicon carbide (Si2C).
5. Semiconducting silicon carbide first found application as a detector in early radios at the beginning of the 20thCentury.
To find out more about the history of silicon carbide, read Anna Ploszajski’s Material of the Month feature in our January issue.
On this day in 1834, Michael Faraday wrote about his continued failure to isolate fluorine.
(Hey, you win some, you lose some).
The element had been identified in minerals, but as fluorine is extremely reactive and forms compounds with most other elements, it had never been isolated before.
This is what happens when fluorine gas hits coal…
Faraday experienced the problem of fluorine’s reactivity 184 years ago today, when he tried using electrolysis to disassociate fluorine from a lead fluorine compound.
Humphry Davy had previously attempted to isolate fluorine using electrolysis (which had led him to successfully isolate sodium and potassium). But Davy worked with hydrofluoric acid, which is corrosive and damaged his eyes.
Davy recovered, but many other experimenters with the dream of being the first to isolate fluorine, ended up poisoning themselves, and became known as the ‘fluorine martyrs’.
After 74 years and many chemists’ trial and error, elemental fluorine was eventually isolated via electrolysis by Henri Moissan in 1886, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1906.
In August 1897, newspaper headlines across the USA proclaimed that gold and riches could be easily attained if people were prepared to up and move to Yukon, in Canada. More than 100,000 people made the journey, as enthusiastic migrants prepared for the long trek ahead.
The journey for those who had sought their fortunes in the California gold rush involved hardship, disease and danger, although not quite so formidable as those faced by Yukon hopefuls.
You can find out the full story behind the history of the gold rush here.
An assembly of Corning’s iconic Pyrex lab glassware (top, courtesy of Corning). Pyrex is used to ensure railway signal lantern against failure in rain and snow (bottom, C&EN Archives, 1943).
The glasses now known under the trademark “Pyrex” had their origin in an effort to make impossible the failure of the glass globe in a lighted railroad signal lantern exposed to rain or snow. The glass first developed had low thermal expansion and was entirely satisfactory for the purpose. Its freak composition, however, resulted in slow but complete solubility in water and its field of application was therefore limited. Only after the traditional seven years of constant research in Corning Glass Works laboratories was a glass highly resistant both to chemical attack and to thermal shock ready for the market. Even then years of unprofitable manufacture followed, caused by difficulties incident to the high temperatures required for melting and working the new material.
Evidence is plentiful that the chief beneficiary of such a development is the average citizen of the United States. The majority of American housewives today are using clean, transparent Pyrex ware in oven and on top of stove, for coffee brewing and for baby nursing. On the basis of the National Bureau of Standards reports on its superiority the laboratory man long ago substituted it for imported glassware. Hundreds of miles of Pyrex pipe line are giving service with quantities of other Pyrex equipment in chemical manufacturing plants.
Action on the American Chemical Front: Development of Pyrex Glassware
Microbiology at the NJ Historical Commission Forum
Monmouth University hosted the NJ History Forum where I talked about the great history of New Jersey and Microbiology on behalf of my colleagues at Rutgers.
One presentation is titled The 75th Anniversary of the Discovery of Streptomycin (upcoming in 2019); the other is titled An Official New Jersey State Microbe! Streptomyces griseus. The revolutionary antibiotic streptomycin was discovered as a product the microbe Streptomyces griseus isolated from New Jersey soil.
Authors of the presentations are Douglas Eveleigh, Jeff Boyd, Jessica Lisa, Max Haagblom, and John Warhol.
To learn more about microbiology, check out the book:https://tinyurl.com/Warhol-Small-Guide. It costs less than a burger and a Coke, it lasts longer, and is more fun!
Annie J. Easley (1933-2011): computer scientist, mathematician & rocket scientist who worked for NASA. She was a leading member of the team which developed software for the Centaur rocket & one of the first African-Americans to work as a computer scientist at NASA – she was one of four African Americans of about 2500 employees.
The Scottish chemist and physicist co-directed the Davy-Faraday Research Lab at the Ri from the end of the 19th Century. He is best known for inventing the Dewar flask aka vacuum flask aka Thermos.
Though he sadly didn’t profit from its widespread popularity, as he didn’t patent his invention before Thermos started using the design ()
Dewar’s flask aided his work into the liquefaction of then-so-called permanent gases like hydrogen and helium, as he could work at temperatures close to absolute zero ❄️
Whilst at the Ri he built machinery to yield high quantities of liquid oxygen, and showed that liquid oxygen and liquid ozone are attracted to the poles of a magnet
He also gave 9 series of Christmas Lectures for children! On topics ranging wide from ‘A Soap Bubble’ to 'The Story of a Meteorite’ to 'The Chemistry of Light and Photography’.
If you’ve ever wondered who to thank for your ice cold drink on a hot Summer’s day, it’s this legend: James Dewar. Dewar invented the flask that many of us use daily.
Dewar never patented his invention of the flask. Instead, it was later patented and renamed by 2 German glass blowers, who set up the Thermos company, giving the Dewar flask its common name - the Thermos! *Dewar shakes fist*
The Dewar flask works by placing a smaller flask within a larger one, and sealing them at the neck. Between the 2 vessels is a gap which has had almost all of the air sucked out to create a near-vacuum.
This vacuum reduces heat transfer between the drink inside your flask, and outside world, be it hot or cold. This is because there are too few particles in the vacuum for heat energy to transfer through it by conduction or convection currents.
Aged 35 (and a half) Tesla delivered a talk here at the Ri on AC power that was so spectacular, audiences flocked back the next night for an encore.
We love a science demonstration, and judging by his sprawling lecture desk, so did Tesla…
120 years after Tesla stood in the Faraday theatre (in 1892) we recreated a demonstration of his Tesla coil in the 2012 Christmas Lectures: https://youtu.be/5piP_qfDvBA?t=4s
A lion cub and a room full of children - what could possibly go wrong? This photo is from Julian Huxley’s 1937 Christmas Lectures ‘Rare Animals and the Disappearance of Wild Life’
Julian Huxley was born on this day in 1887. A passion for evolutionary biology clearly ran in the family - he was the grandson of Thomas Henry Huxley, AKA ‘Darwin’s Bulldog’ for his staunch and loyal support of Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection.
On this day in 1903 Pierre Curie, accompanied by Marie Curie, gave a Friday Evening Discourse at the Ri, simply titled ‘Le Radium’.
That same year Pierre and Marie were awarded half of the Nobel Prize for Physics for their work on the spontaneous radiation discovered by Henri Becquerel, who was awarded the other half of the Prize.
Pierre Curie used an early sample of radium during his Discourse demonstration and stored it in this copper alloy pot and box, which are still radioactive to this day.
Happy Valentine’s Day! We found some slightly creepy Victorian Valentines poems in the Tyndall collection. These weren’t serious love notes, but a running joke between John Tyndall and his friends ❤️
“Callous, cruel, clever Tyndall! Pause, lest for your sport you kindle“
On this day in 1834, Michael Faraday wrote about his continued failure to isolate fluorine.
(Hey, you win some, you lose some).
The element had been identified in minerals, but as fluorine is extremely reactive and forms compounds with most other elements, it had never been isolated before.
This is what happens when fluorine gas hits coal…
Faraday experienced the problem of fluorine’s reactivity 184 years ago today, when he tried using electrolysis to disassociate fluorine from a lead fluorine compound.
Humphry Davy had previously attempted to isolate fluorine using electrolysis (which had led him to successfully isolate sodium and potassium). But Davy worked with hydrofluoric acid, which is corrosive and damaged his eyes.
Davy recovered, but many other experimenters with the dream of being the first to isolate fluorine, ended up poisoning themselves, and became known as the ‘fluorine martyrs’.
After 74 years and many chemists’ trial and error, elemental fluorine was eventually isolated via electrolysis by Henri Moissan in 1886, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1906.
PhD student Sarah Madden dug through our collections to learn more about the history of crystallography. Read about her experience below.
I’m a PhD student working in cancer research at the University of Cambridge, and currently work as the Media and Communications Assistant at the Royal Institution.
One of my favourite days of my time here was getting to look through the archives with the Ri’s lovely curator of collections, Charlotte. Being the self-confessed crystallography geek that I am, Charlotte was kind enough to let me look through the history of X-ray crystallography.
X-ray crystallography is the process of growing crystals of a compound, and then analysing them with X-rays to work out the compound’s structure.
William Henry Bragg and his son, William Lawrence Bragg, were the ‘Fathers’ of X-ray crystallography. Both served as Directors of the Davy-Faraday Research Laboratory at the Royal Institution.
They came up with Bragg’s law, which allows crystallographers to work out the structure of a compound.
We do this by looking at the diffraction pattern generated by by sending X-rays through crystals of the compound with unknown structure.
Lawrence Bragg constantly wrote letters to his father to ask for help with his research, many of which are stored in the Royal Institution’s archives. The father and son team were awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1915. Lawrence was only 25 at the time and was withdrawn from the front line where he was serving as an officer during World War 1.
The collection at the Royal Institution includes a host of Lawrence’s belongings, including his Nobel prize diploma, his photographs of crystal diffraction patterns and his notebook with Bragg’s law written in it.
Maria Mitchell, the first professional American woman astronomer, was born on this day in 1818 in Nantucket, Massachusetts. Mitchell was also the first woman member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, two years after its formation, in 1850.
Mitchell was born to Quaker parents who believed in the education of all of their ten children, regardless of gender. Mitchell received a formal education, as well as learning from her father, who was a schoolteacher, banker, and astronomer. He also helped to maintain chronometers, a timepiece sailors used to measure longitude based on time and celestial navigation, for the local whaling fleet. His daughter would assist him in doing astronomical observations and later was trusted to complete them on her own.
In 1835, at the age of 17, Mitchell founded her own elementary school, which was open to girls regardless of race. The following year, Mitchell left the school to take a job at the Nantucket Athaneum, then a private, but affordable, library. She remained at the Athaneum until 1856.
On Oct. 1, 1847, Mitchell was using a two-inch telescope on a Nantucket rooftop when she noticed a blurry object that did not appear on her star charts. This turned out to be a comet, which became known as “Miss Mitchell’s Comet” and later C/1847 T1. She became the third woman, after two 18th-century German astronomers—Caroline Herschel and Maria Margarethe Kirch—to discover a comet. King Frederick VI of Denmark, who had offered a prize for the discovery of new comets, awarded Mitchell a medal. She also became the first woman elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences because of her discovery.
In 1865, Mitchell was the first person invited to join the faculty of the newly established Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. She accepted the founder’s invitation, in part because it came with the promise of an observatory outfitted with a 12-inch telescope, then the second largest in the country. She went on to become a beloved professor, teaching more than 20 years and nurturing her students’ abilities as researchers in their own right. Her students did independent, original research and even engaged in field work with Mitchell’s professional peers during the solar eclipses of 1869 and 1878. Mitchell, who was involved in suffrage organizations and who served as the second president of the American Association of Women, also organized discussions and lectures for her students about women’s rights and politics.
Galileo didn’t know it at the time, but his observations of sunspot activity in 1612 were tailor-made for the animated GIF! He demonstrated that sunspots can be tracked across the disk of the sun as it rotates–look for the cluster labeled R moving from top left to lower right.
Galilei, Galileo, 1564-1642. Istoria e dimostrazioni intorno alle macchie solari e loro accidenti, 1613.
Edgar Mitchell, the 6th man to walk on the moon, passed away Thursday night, at the age of 85. Mitchell was part of the Apollo 14 crew. Our thoughts go out to his family.
Above is a series of images of Jupiter taken by NASA’s Pioneer 10 spacecraft. Jupiter appears as a crescent during the spacecraft’s approach, then gradually decreasing in size as Pioneer 10 continued past the Jovian system.
Pioneer 10 was the first spacecraft to visit Jupiter in 1973. After Jupiter, it continued through the orbits of the other outer planets. The Pioneer 10 mission ended in 1997, with communications continuing until a final, faint signal was received in 2003. Pioneer 10 is traveling towards Aldebaran, an orange giant star in the constellation Taurus, and will make its closest approach in about 2 million years.
One hundred years have passed since Albert Einstein submitted the defining paper about the theory of general relativity. Titled “The Field Equations of Gravitation”, Einstein presented the final, workable field equations of general relativity that describes the interaction of gravity and the geometry of spacetime. This video celebrates the hundredth anniversary of the theory with a brief overview of the subject.
One of my favorite things is to look at old dinosaur art from the 19th Century, like these from “Earth Before the Deluge” from 1879.
Nowadays, despite the fact there are thousands of species of dinosaur, there are only six or seven “superstar” species used in every movie. Velociraptor is the latest addition to the list, since Jurassic Park and the Raptor Red books (you will not find a velociraptor in any movie prior to 1993), but if you asked someone from the 19th Century what the top dinosaurs were, the ones that drew crowds and were most associated with the concept, they’d probably say Iguanadon, Megalosaurus, Mosasaurus, Hyleosaurus, Icthyosaurus, and, as the 19th century started to end, Diplodocus (only the last one is all that well known to casual dinosaur fans). That’s because those dinosaurs were the earliest used to describe the concept.
