Woolsthorpe Manor House

1947 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 34-36
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Reinforced Concrete ◽  
Sir Isaac Newton ◽  
Concrete Floor ◽  
Isaac Newton ◽  
Architectural Features ◽  
The World ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Manor House

This diminutive manor house, famous throughout the world as the birthplace of Sir Isaac Newton, has been the subject of studied repair. It is now the property of the National Trust and only essential works connected with its maintenance and preservation have been carried out. Dating from the early seventeenth century, the house in its plan, no less than in the treatment of its external features, expresses the Cotswold tradition of masoncraft, which once extended from Gloucestershire to Lincolnshire. Built of local stone the architectural features consist of moulded window jambs and mullions, finely wrought chimney stacks and well proportioned quoins. The original lead glazing has disappeared from nearly all the main windows. Regarding the roofs the original ‘Colly Weston' stone slates are in position. Internally many of the period fittings, such as doors, cupboards and stone fireplaces, can be seen. The construction of the bedroom floors in a certain measure anticipates the reinforced concrete floor of the present day. At Woolsthorpe the floors, which measure about four and a half inches thick, are formed of reeds and mortar. After more than three hundred years of usage these floors are still free from defects. Externally, beyond very necessary repairs to the masonry of the chimney stacks, the addition of copper gutters and some minor work, nothing has been done to alter the exterior of the house. It was, however, found expedient to demolish some stone steps and an outside convenience of nineteenth-century date.

The Libraries of Newton, Hooke and Boyle

1966 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 42-55 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Scientific Literature ◽  
Scientific Theories ◽  
Robert Hooke ◽  
Sir Isaac Newton ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
Isaac Newton ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of

The demand and search for the scientific literature of the past has grown enormously in the last twenty years. In an age as conscious as ours of the significance of science to mankind, some scientists naturally turned their thoughts to the origins of science as we know it, how scientific theories grew and how discoveries were made. Both institutions and individual scientists partake in these interests and form collections of books necessary for their study. How did their predecessors fare in this respect? They, of course, formed their libraries at a time when books were easy to find—and cheap. But what did they select for their particular reading? For example, what did the libraries of the three greatest scientists of the seventeenth century, Sir Isaac Newton, Robert Hooke and Robert Boyle, look like? Fortunately in the case of Newton, the history of his books is now fairly clear, thanks to the devoted labours of Colonel R . de Villamil (i), but it is a sad reflection on our attitude to our great intellectual leaders that this library o f the greatest English scientist, whose work changed the world for hundreds of years, was not taken care of, was, in fact, forgotten and at times entirely neglected.

The Curious Eye

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erin Webster
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Human Vision ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Robert Hooke ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
Isaac Newton ◽  
Johannes Kepler ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Historical Moment

The Curious Eye explores early modern debates over two related questions: what are the limits of human vision, and to what extent can these limits be overcome by technological enhancement? Today, in our everyday lives we rely on optical technology to provide us with information about visually remote spaces even as we question the efficacy and ethics of such pursuits. But the debates surrounding the subject of technologically mediated vision have their roots in a much older literary tradition in which the ability to see beyond the limits of natural human vision is associated with philosophical and spiritual insight as well as social and political control. The Curious Eye provides insight into the subject of optically mediated vision by returning to the literature of the seventeenth century, the historical moment in which human visual capacity in the West was first extended through the application of optical technologies to the eye. Bringing imaginative literary works by Francis Bacon, John Milton, Margaret Cavendish, and Aphra Behn together with optical and philosophical treatises by Johannes Kepler, René Descartes, Robert Hooke, Robert Boyle, and Isaac Newton, The Curious Eye explores the social and intellectual impact of the new optical technologies of the seventeenth century on its literature. At the same time, it demonstrates that social, political, and literary concerns are not peripheral to the optical science of the period but rather an integral part of it, the legacy of which we continue to experience.

scholarly journals Przestrogi dla utopistów. Wizje optimum dóbr w historii idei w książce Andrzeja Waśkiewicza

2021 ◽  
Vol 65 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-167
Author(s):  
Grzegorz Sokół
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Social Thought ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Social Orders

The subject of this essay is Andrzej Waśkiewicz’s book Ludzie – rzeczy – ludzie. O porządkach społecznych, gdzie rzeczy łączą, nie dzielą (People–Things–People: On Social Orders Where Things Connect Rather Than Divide People). The book is the work of a historian of ideas and concerns contemporary searches for alternatives to capitalism: the review presents the book’s overview of visions of society in which the market, property, inequality, or profit do not play significant roles. Such visions reach back to Western utopian social and political thought, from Plato to the nineteenth century. In comparing these ideas with contemporary visions of the world of post-capitalism, the author of the book proposes a general typology of such images. Ultimately, in reference to Simmel, he takes a critical stance toward the proposals, recognizing the exchange of goods to be a fundamental and indispensable element of social life. The author of the review raises two issues that came to mind while reading the book. First, the juxtaposition of texts of a very different nature within the uniform category of “utopia” causes us to question the role and status of reflections regarding the future and of speculative theory in contemporary social thought; second, such a juxtaposition suggests that reflecting on the social “optimal good” requires a much more precise and complex conception of a “thing,” for instance, as is proposed by new materialism or anthropological studies of objects and value as such.

Gendered Ecologies

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Women Writers ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
Sir Isaac Newton ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
Isaac Newton ◽  
Natural Domain ◽  
Diachronic Study ◽  
Natural Philosophers ◽  
Michael Faraday

Gendered Ecologies: New Materialist Interpretations of Women Writers in the Long Nineteenth Century is comprised of a diverse collection of essays featuring analyses of literary women writers, ecofeminism, feminist ecocriticism, and the value of the interrelationships that exist among human, nonhuman, and nonliving entities as part of the environs. The book presents a case for the often-disregarded literary women writers of the long nineteenth century, who were active contributors to the discourse of natural history—the diachronic study of participants as part of a vibrant community interconnected by matter. While they were not natural philosophers as in the cases of Sir Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle, and Michael Faraday among others, these women writers did engage in acute observations of materiality in space (e.g., subjects, objects, and abjects), reasoned about their findings, and encoded their discoveries of nature in their literary and artistic productions. The collection includes discussions of the works of influential literary women from the long nineteenth century—Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, Caroline Norton, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, Margaret Fuller, Susan Fenimore Cooper, Celia Thaxter, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Francis Wright, and Lydia Maria Child—whose multi-directional observations of animate and inanimate objects in the natural domain are based on self-made discoveries while interacting with the environs.

Renaissance and Modern Thought on the Last Things: A Study in Changing Conceptions

1958 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 169-185 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. A. Patrides
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Fundamental Idea ◽  
Exact Time ◽  
Day Of The Lord ◽  
The World ◽  
Modern Thought ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Creation

Of the changes that have taken place in theology since the Renaissance, none is more striking than the re-interpretation of the Mosaic account of the creation and fall of man, which has passed from the realm of history to that of ‘myth.’ Equally impressive, however, are the changes that have taken place in eschatology. This disagreement with our ancestors is not revolutionary on every point, since at least one fundamental idea, affirmed by George Hakewill in the earlier seventeenth century, still holds true. “That the world shall haue an end,” wrote Hakewill, “is as cleere to Christianity, as that there is a Sun in the firmament: And therefore, whereas there can hardly be named any other article of our faith, which some Heretiques haue not presumed to impugne or call into question; yet to my remembrance I never met with any who questioned this; & though at this day many & eager be the differences among Christians in other points of Religion, yet in this they all agree & ever did, that the world shall haue an end.” If on this, however, all Christians are agreed, the exact time of the Day of the Lord has been the subject of speculation ever since the advent of Christianity, not to mention Jewish apocalyptic thought.

scholarly journals At the Anniversary Meeting, November 30, 1844

1851 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 519-538
Keyword(s):  
Royal Society ◽  
Sir Isaac Newton ◽  
Isaac Newton ◽  
Legal Proceedings ◽  
The Public ◽  
Foreign Countries ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Antarctic

Gentlemen, The time has again come round for my addressing you, and for ex­pressing my own gratitude, as well as yours, to your Council for their constant and zealous attention to the interests of the Royal Society. We have been compelled during several late years to have recourse to legal proceedings on the subject of the great tithes of Mablethorp, a portion of the Society’s property, and I rejoice to say with success. In my last address, I was required to give our thanks to Mr. Watt and to Mr. Dollond for the valuable busts which they had kindly presented to us. That of Mr. Dollond is placed at the commence­ment of the staircase leading to our apartments, and serves to indi­cate that his valuable improvements in the construction of our tele­scopes have been so many steps to the acquisition of higher and higher knowledge of the great universe of which this globe forms so insignificant a part. By the liberality of Mr. Watt we shall soon be furnished with handsome pedestals for the busts of his father and of Sir Isaac Newton, the two great lights of British mechanical genius and British philosophical science. Mr. Gilbert has kindly undertaken to furnish a similar pedestal for the bust of his father, and we have thought it right to provide one for that of Sir Joseph Banks. These will shortly form a conspicuous ornament of our place of meeting. The magnetical observatories are still carrying on their observa­tions, both in Her Majesty’s dominions and in foreign countries, and another naval officer, Lieut. Moore, has proceeded to the Antarctic Seas to complete a portion of the survey of Captain Sir James Ross, which was interrupted by stress of weather. That gallant and enter­ prising officer will, I hope, ere long give to us and to the public his own narrative of his important discoveries. Detailed accounts of the botany and zoology of the regions visited by him are preparing under the patronage of the Government, while Colonel Sabine is proceeding with the raagnetical observations, which were the more immediate objects of this, one of the most important voyages of discovery ever undertaken.

scholarly journals Nineveh sails for the New World: Assyria envisioned by nineteenth-century America

Iraq ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 66 ◽  
pp. 243-256
Author(s):  
Steven W. Holloway
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
British Museum ◽  
Historical Representation ◽  
Sir Isaac Newton ◽  
Gothic Revival ◽  
Museum Exhibits ◽  
Isaac Newton ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
Revival Movement

In order to understand the unique reception of ancient Assyria in nineteenth-century America, it is necessary to describe the British public's own reception of the earliest British Museum exhibits, together with the marketing of publications of Layard and others. And, in order to grasp something of both Britain's and America's keen fascination with the earliest images of Assyria, I must introduce you briefly to the changing perceptions and tastes in admissible historical representation that, I believe, drove this fascination.The British public's breathless enthusiasm for the monuments from Bible lands had radical origins in English soil. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century antiquarians surveyed, sketched and wove theories about the prehistoric relics that dot the English landscape, occasionally linking them with a mythical Christian past. William Stukeley, for example, student and first biographer of Sir Isaac Newton, made something of a career out of surveying Avebury and Stonehenge, in an early eighteenth-century quest for evidence that could link the Britons of Celtic fame with the peoples and the received timeline of the Bible. By the early nineteenth century, the Gothic Revival movement had begun in earnest. Its proponents saw this project as a moral mainstay in the revitalization of English society and culture. English prehistoric and medieval monuments would be measured, drawn, catalogued, published, and ultimately by so doing, laid at the feet of the British public. The Napoleonic wars accelerated this movement, for Continental sightseeing was impossible, so the classic Grand Tour evaporated down to an insular walking tour. This of course fuelled the sense of British national destiny:Works on topography… tend to make us better acquainte d with every thing which exists in our native land, and are therefore conducive to the progress of real knowledge, to the diffusion of rational patriotism, and to virtuous sentiments and propensities …

Some Trends in Scholarship 1868–1968, in the field of Modern History

1969 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 159-184
Author(s):  
Herbert Butterfield
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
General Practice ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
Historical Consciousness ◽  
Modern History ◽  
Historical Knowledge ◽  
The Subject

Because of paradoxes which lie in the very nature of historical knowledge, our branch of scholarship was two centuries late in accomplishing the equivalent of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. Only in the nineteenth century was it possible to establish, and to put into general practice, those techniques of discovery and verification which enable the student really to feel his feet. And only after this could the subject itself take the leap into that course of ever-accelerating development which the scientist had achieved at an earlier date. In the 1850's the young Acton was entranced by the tremendous awakening of the historical consciousness that had occurred in Germany. He was exultant because history had come to preside over so many branches of thought and activity. But the experience that really changed his outlook, and was to hold the prior place in his memory, was a later one—the result of that wider opening of the archives which took place in the region of the year 1860. This was the key that seemed to unlock the last drawer, making men feel that, now at last, they could really get down to the study of history. We may wonder whether anybody will ever again have quite the exhilaration of those who had the run of the newlyopened archives. A quick hunt through the papers would at least give them a story to tell, and they might hope soon to expose the things which governments or churches had managed to hide in days when significant secrets could be kept.

Brighter than how many suns? Sir Isaac Newton’s burning mirror

1989 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-51 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Royal Society ◽  
Scientific Literature ◽  
Radiant Heat ◽  
The Other ◽  
Sir Isaac Newton ◽  
Isaac Newton ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The Press ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Hearsay Evidence

There are a number of references in the scientific literature to a burning mirror designed by Sir Isaac Newton (1). Together, they record that it was made from seven separate concave glasses, each about a foot in diameter, that Newton demonstrated its effects at several meetings of the Royal Society and that he presented it to the Society. Nonetheless, neither the earliest published list of instruments possessed by the Royal Society nor the most recent one mentions the burning mirror; the latest compiler does not even include it amongst those items, once owned, now lost. No reference to the instrument apparently survives in the Society’s main records. It is not listed by the author of the recent compendium on Newton’s life and work (2). There is, however, some contemporary information still extant (Appendix 1). Notes of the principles of its design and some of its effects are to be found in the Society’s Journal Book for 1704; some of the dimensions and the arrangement of the mirrors are given in a Lexicon published by John Harris which he donated to the Royal Society at the same meeting, 12 July 1704, at which Newton gave the Society the speculum. The last reference in the Journal Book is dated 15 November that year, when Mr Halley, the then secretary to the Society, was desired to draw up an account of the speculum and its effects (3). No such account appears to have been presented to the Royal Society. There is no reference in Newton’s published papers and letters of his chasing Halley to complete the task, nor is there any mention of it in the general references to Halley. The latter was, of course, quite accustomed to performing odd jobs for Newton; that same year he was to help the Opticks through the press. The only other contemporary reference to the burning mirror, though only hearsay evidence since Flamsteed was not present at the meeting, is in a letter the latter wrote to James Pound; this confirms that there were seven mirrors and that the aperture of each was near a foot in diameter (4). Because John Harris gave his Dictionary to the Royal Society in Newton’s presence, it is reasonable to assume that his description is accurate. As Newton would hardly have left an inaccurate one unchallenged, then, belatedly, the account desired of Mr Halley can be presented. In some respects, the delay is advantageous, since the subject of radiant heat and its effects, although already by Newton’s period an ancient one, is today rather better understood. On the other hand, some data has to be inferred, that could have been measured, and some assumptions made about Newton’s procedures and understanding that could have been checked (5).

On the attractions of homogeneous ellipsoids

1832 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 341-341
Keyword(s):  
Centrifugal Force ◽  
Second Order ◽  
Mutual Attraction ◽  
Sir Isaac Newton ◽  
Isaac Newton ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Rotatory Motion

The theory of the figures of the planets involves two questions perfectly distinct from each other; first, the figure which a mass of matter would assume by the mutual attraction of its particles, combined with a centrifugal force, arising from rotatory motion; and secondly, the force with which a body so formed will attract a particle occupying any proposed situation. The latter is the subject of the present inquiry; and it is also limited to the consideration of homogeneous bodies bounded by finite surfaces of the second order. This subject was first partially treated of by Sir Isaac Newton, who, in determining the attraction of spherical bodies, has also treated of other solids, formed by the rotation of curves round an axis, and of the attractions they exert upon bodies placed in the line of their axes. MacLaurin was the first who determined the attractions that such spheroids of revolutions exert on particles placed anywhere, either in or within their surfaces.

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