Cromwell Mortimer, F. R. S. ( c . 1698-1752) and the invention of the metalline thermometer for measuring high temperatures

Although the liquid-in-glass thermometer came into use either in the last decade of the sixteenth or during the early years of the seventeenth century (1), it was not until the eighteenth century that reproducible scales of temperature were established, arising from the work of Fahrenheit (2), Reaumur (3) and Celsius (4). So far as eighteenth-century chemists were concerned, the upper limit of temperature to which the liquid-in-glass thermometer could be used was set by the boiling point of mercury, at that time assumed to be 600 °F (5). In the latter half of the seventeenth century any temperatures attained in chemical operations could be indicated only by reference to a scale comprising some seven ‘degrees of heat’. In the middle to upper ranges, for example, to quote from Glaser’s The Compleat Chymist , the third ‘degree’ was that of hot ashes; the fourth ‘degree’ was that of hot sand, and the fifth that of hot iron filings; the sixth ‘degree’ was attained in the closed reverberatory charcoal fire, and the seventh and highest ‘degree’ was the ‘Flaming-Fire or Fire of Fusion’, made with wood or charcoal (6).

Author(s):  
Lisa West

This chapter surveys Charles Brockden Brown’s early biography into five sections. The first provides background on eighteenth-century Quaker history and culture in Philadelphia, including the unlawful arrest and banishment of Elijah Brown, Charles’s father. The second section reviews Brown’s youth, adolescence, and education. The third discusses his law apprenticeship from 1787 to 1793, a period during which he participated in literary clubs, experimented with writing, and developed meaningful friendships. His letters during these years show interest in a variety of moral issues and sometimes critique traditional tenets of Christianity. The fourth section discusses Brown’s early publications and his manuscript epistolary narratives. The final section focuses on the years 1793–1795, when Brown strengthened connections with the New York intellectual circle and distanced himself from his Philadelphia social network, culminating in a cogent rejection of Christianity.


Vivarium ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 51 (1-4) ◽  
pp. 464-481 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephan Meier-Oeser

Abstract The paper focuses on some aspects of the early modern aftermath of supposition theory within the framework of the protestant logical tradition. Due to the growing influence of Humanism, supposition theory from the third decade of the sixteenth century was the object of general neglect and contempt. While in the late sixteenth-century a number of standard textbooks of post-Tridentine scholastic logic reintegrated this doctrine, although in a bowdlerized version, it remained for a century out of the scope of Protestant logic. The situation changed when the Strasburg Lutheran theologian J.C. Dannhauer, who in 1630 developed and propagated the program of a new discipline which he called ‘general hermeneutics’ (hermeneutica generalis), accentuating the importance of supposition theory as an indispensable device for the purpose of textual interpretation. Due to Dannhauer’s influence on later developments of hermeneutics, which in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was regarded as a logical discipline, supposition theory is still present in several logical treatises of the eighteenth century. The explication of the underlying views on the notion of supposition and its logico-semantic function may give at least some clues as to how to answer the question of what supposition theory was all about.


1960 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 365-382
Author(s):  
Harold Spencer Jones

This year the Royal Society celebrates the third centenary of its foundation. In this paper Sir Harold Spencer Jones, the late Astronomer Royal, who was the Institute's first President, describes the early years of the Society and shows how closely some of its work was related to navigation.For some two thousand years, until well into the seventeenth century, the writings of the ancient Greek philosophers, and in particular those of Aristotle, were regarded as the supreme fountain of wisdom and the source of all knowledge. The break with the Aristotelian dogma may be said to have started with the publication by Copernicus in 1543 of his De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium whereby the Earth was displaced from proud position as the centre of the Universe, fixed and immovable, and asserted to be not only rotating around an axis but also to be merely one of a system of planets revolving around the Sun as a centre. Copernicus had refrained for thirty years from publishing his theory as he knew that it would be received with ridicule, not merely because it was not in accordance with Aristotelian dogma but also because it would be held to be against the Scriptures. The Copernican theory met, in fact, with widespread opposition and more than a century elapsed before it came to be generally accepted; for long it was regarded as merely a convenient mathematical representation of the motions of the planets without any true physical basis.


1989 ◽  
Vol 25 ◽  
pp. 311-352
Author(s):  
Owen Dudley Edwards

To assert at the outset of this study, as I do, that the task before me is both impossible and essential, may be justly proclaimed a proceeding both cowardly and obvious. We are principally concerned with the nineteenth century, but the twentieth century prolonged many of the features of Irish Roman Catholic clerical identity of the nineteenth, in North America as elsewhere. Vitally important patterns and castes (social and mental) were established in the eighteenth century, and the first Irish-American Roman Catholic priestof major significance in the United States, John Carroll (1735-1815), first Roman Catholic bishop in the U.SA and first archbishop of Baltimore, owed his American birth initially to migration of his father’s kinsmen in the late seventeenth century. Anglophone North America from 178 3 consisted of two political obediences, with similarities and contrasts both subtle and, at least superficially, forceful. The huge and consistently expanding area of white settlement in North America in which the Irish Catholic clergy participated, created other great divergences: when American historians at the end of the nineteenth century under the influence of figures as divergent as Frederick Jackson Turner of the ‘frontier thesis’, Ulrich Bonnell Phillips of slavery apologetics, and Alfred Thayer Mahan of sea-power celebration, looked to environmentalism as the chief explanation of the American past, they may have oversimplified—indeed, they did oversimplify—but their sheer preoccupation with the question gives its own warnings against a filio-pietism which chooses to see an Irish ethnic character resolutely asserting itself to the third, fourth, and even later generations.


2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-97
Author(s):  
GUIDO OLIVIERI

ABSTRACTThe analysis of a forgotten source sheds light on the early history of the cello in seventeenth-century Naples. The manuscript MS 2-D-13, held in the library of the Montecassino Abbey, dates from around 1699 and contains two unknown cello sonatas by Giovanni Bononcini, together with passacaglias, sonatas for two ‘violas’ and elaborations over antiphons by Gaetano Francone and Rocco Greco, two prominent string performers and teachers in Naples. A study of this remarkable source helps to clarify the nomenclature of the bass violins in use in the city and offers new evidence on the practice of continuo realization at the cello, as well as on the connections with partimento practice. This collection is thus of critical importance for a discussion of the technical achievements and developments of the cello repertory in Naples before the emergence of the celebrated generation of Neapolitan cello virtuosi in the early years of the eighteenth century.


1979 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-14
Author(s):  
Joseph B. Gavin

It is not often that a full-length work on recusant history appears in a foreign language, and for this reason the Reverend Bruno Navarra's book in Italian, Filippo Michele Ellis: Segni e la sua Diocesi nei primi del ‘700 (Roma, Centro Studi del Lazio [1973], Piazza Montecitorio, 115), should be brought to the attention of Recusant History readers. This book on Philip Michael Ellis, O.S.B., first Vicar Apostolic of the Western District, and later Bishop of Segni in Italy, should be most welcome to anyone interested in English Catholicism during the time of James II and the early years of the eighteenth century. There has been a noticeable lack of biographical research, either general or particular, on those involved in the organization of the English Catholic Church at the end of the seventeenth century. Perhaps the time has come for a more specific picture of this period; to a very limited degree Navarra has filled some of the lacuna.


1986 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 113-124 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean Robin

The popularly held belief that in Victorian times a rigid code of sexual behaviour was in operation throughout the country, and that transgression of the code resulted in loss of respectability, has been under attack for some time now. One of the weapons used in the assault has been the extent of prenuptial pregnancy during the period compared with earlier centuries. In the first of his two papers on prenuptial pregnancy in England, published in 1966, P. E. H. Hair demonstrated that the phenomenon was of long duration. Roughly one-third of his sample of 1,855 brides traced to a maternity between the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries had been pregnant at marriage, and he considered that this was an under-estimate of the true proportion. Data from a number of reconstitution studies published in a recent work edited by Laslett, Oosterveen and Smith show that prenuptial pregnancies, measured in 50-year periods from 1550–1849, peaked in the second half of the sixteenth century at 31 per cent of all marriages traced to the birth of a child, only to decline over the next hundred years through the heyday of Puritanism and beyond to their nadir of 16 per cent by the end of the seventeenth century. From the early eighteenth century onwards, however, the proportion of such pregnancies increased, at first slowly and then gathering pace until by 1800 the previous peak at the end of the sixteenth century had been passed, the proportion of prenuptial pregnancies standing at 33 per cent. The rate continued to rise through the early years of the nineteenth century into the Victorian era, reaching 37 per cent for the 50 years ending in 1849.


1965 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 182-203 ◽  
Author(s):  
Asunción Lavrin

During the second half of the seventeenth century and the early years of the eighteenth century relaxation of the morals of religious orders, especially the masculine ones, and of the priesthood was notable in Spain and her American dominions. That this situation also existed in New Spain was reported in detail by several contemporary Viceroys in the Instrucciones to their successors. This relaxation also extended to feminine orders, though in their case it did not lead to a similar moral looseness, but to a lack of proper observance of their Rules and Constitutions. Among the main charges against nunneries were: the possession of large numbers of servants; the constant demands made upon the families of nuns for money to be spent on the needs of convents; quarrels, both among members of communities and with their Superiors, leading to appeals to civil authorities and frequent contacts with the outer world, which deteriorated the spiritual character of these institutions.


2015 ◽  
Vol 49 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 322-337
Author(s):  
Georg Michels

The essay argues that Old Belief did not emerge as a popular movement giving voice to the aspirations of ordinary Muscovites but rather as an elite culture that drew its inspiration from erudite churchmen closely affiliated with the Kremlin. The popularization of Old Belief occurred only during the last two decades of the seventeenth century, and was not completed even until the third decade of the eighteenth century. Most important in this process – which one might call the confessionalization of Old Belief – were the systematic dissemination of manuscripts, the canonization of Old Believer saints (such as the martyred Avvakum), and the development of an efficient school system. The author draws attention to the little-studied fact that Old Believers – both the founding fathers of the 1650s and eighteenth-century community leaders such as Andrei Denisov – drew inspiration from Ukrainian Orthodox models: they assimilated ideas from polemical texts against the Union of Brest (such as the idea of the Antichrist) and adopted the teaching methods of the Ukrainian seminary school which Denisov and other Old Believer intellectuals observed while studying at the Kievan Theological Academy.


Sir Andrew Noble, who died at Ardkinglas, his Scottish home, on October 22, 1915, was born at Greenock on September 13, 1831. His father was George Noble, a retired naval captain, who lived in a house which at that time was called 65, Union Street, but was afterwards named “Springbank.” In earlier days the Nobles had been landowners in Dumbartonshire, but the property was sold at the end of the eighteenth century. It was bought back again in 1889 by the subject of this memoir, who, when he was made a baronet in 1902, was able to associate with his name the family estates of Ardmore and Ardardan. George Noble had twelve children, five sons and seven daughters. Andrew was the third son. The home life was one of strictness and discipline, for the father's ideas of education were very thorough. the rudiments of learning were instilled into the boys by various teachers in Greenock, beginning with Peter Murray, who grounded them in English grammar, and ending with the classes of Mr. Robert Buchanan, who taught them writing and mathematics. From his early years Andrew always did well in these local intellectual contests, and he became the possessor of several small silver medals, with the word Dux upon them, From Greenock he went on to the Academy at Edinburgh, and passed as a cadet into Woolwich in the spring of 1847. His father died of typhus fever in the autumn of the same year.


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