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James Watt, Jr
James Watt, Jr., FRS (5 February 1769 – 2 June 1848) was a British engineer, businessman and activist. Early life He was born on 5 February 1769, the son of James Watt by his first wife Margaret Miller, and half-brother of Gregory Watt. He was educated at Winson Green near Birmingham, by the Rev. Henry Pickering. His father was unable to find a better school, though dissatisfied with his son's progress. At age 15 Watt spent a year at the Bersham Ironworks of John Wilkinson; and then went to Geneva. There he lodged with Nicolas-Théodore de Saussure, and knew Marc-Auguste Pictet and Jean-André Deluc. Subsequently, he studied German in Eisenach. In Manchester In 1788 Watt returned to England and a position in the textile trade in Manchester. Initially he worked at Taylor & Maxwell, makers of fustian, where Charles Taylor was a partner. Watt worked there in the counting-house. He was then employed by the Manchester radical Thomas Walker, changing jobs just before the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Fellow Of The Royal Society
Fellowship of the Royal Society (FRS, ForMemRS and HonFRS) is an award granted by the Fellows of the Royal Society of London to individuals who have made a "substantial contribution to the improvement of natural science, natural knowledge, including mathematics, engineering science, and medical science". Overview Fellowship of the Society, the oldest known scientific academy in continuous existence, is a significant honour. It has been awarded to :Fellows of the Royal Society, around 8,000 fellows, including eminent scientists Isaac Newton (1672), Benjamin Franklin (1756), Charles Babbage (1816), Michael Faraday (1824), Charles Darwin (1839), Ernest Rutherford (1903), Srinivasa Ramanujan (1918), Jagadish Chandra Bose (1920), Albert Einstein (1921), Paul Dirac (1930), Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (1944), Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis (1945), Dorothy Hodgkin (1947), Alan Turing (1951), Lise Meitner (1955), Satyendra Nath Bose (1958), and Francis Crick (1959). More recently, fellow ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Thomas Walker (radical)
Thomas Walker (1749–1817) was an English cotton merchant and political radical. Life He was the son of Thomas Walker, a merchant in Bristol who moved to Manchester. An early influence was the teaching of James Burgh. He became a Manchester cotton merchant himself. He had a town house and warehouse on South Parade, adjacent to St Mary's Church, Manchester, and a country place at Barlow Hall, rented from William Egerton. Business campaigns In 1784 Walker led the successful local opposition to William Pitt's fustian tax. With Thomas Richardson, he testified to the Board of Trade committee in London in January 1785. After some confusion during the spring, the House of Commons voted to repeal the tax in April, and the Manchester men returned north as heroes. The same year he founded the General Chamber of Manufactures, set up to lobby against Pitt's measures on trade with Ireland. In 1787 Walker opposed the Eden Treaty, a divisive position. In 1788, at a meeting of fustian ma ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jean-Louis Carra
Jean-Louis Carra (born on 9 March 1742 in Pont-de-Veyle and guillotined on 31 October 1793 in Paris) was a journalist and participant in the French Revolution. He played a key role in the Insurrection of 10 August 1792 that overthrew the monarchy. Biography Early life He was the son of a commissioner of seigniorial rights. When he was still at college in Mâcon, he was imprisoned accused of stealing ribbons. In 1768–1769, he was secretary to the Marc Antoine René de Voyer. There followed a period of wandering in Switzerland and in England, where he was imprisoned for debt, in Russia and in the Moldavia of Prince Grigore Ghica. After collaborating on the Encyclopedia of Yverdon, he joined the team writing the ''Supplément à l'Encyclopédie'' in July 1771, for which he wrote 400 articles on geography, and which he left in June 1772 after a quarrel with the editorial director Robinet. He brought the matter into the public domain by publishing a violent pamphlet against R ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jacobin Club
The Society of the Friends of the Constitution (), renamed the Society of the Jacobins, Friends of Freedom and Equality () after 1792 and commonly known as the Jacobin Club () or simply the Jacobins (; ), was the most influential List of political groups in the French Revolution, political club during the French Revolution of 1789. The period of its political ascendancy includes the Reign of Terror, during which well over 10,000 people were put on trial and executed in France, many for "political crimes". Initially founded in 1789 by Criticism of monarchy, anti-royalist deputies from Duchy of Brittany, Brittany, the club grew into a nationwide Republicanism, republican movement with a membership estimated at a half million or more. The Jacobin Club was heterogeneous and included both prominent parliamentary factions of the early 1790s: The Mountain and the Girondins. In 1792–93, the Girondins were more prominent in leading France when they French Revolutionary Wars, declared ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Joseph Priestley
Joseph Priestley (; 24 March 1733 – 6 February 1804) was an English chemist, Unitarian, Natural philosophy, natural philosopher, English Separatist, separatist theologian, Linguist, grammarian, multi-subject educator and Classical liberalism, classical liberal Political philosophy, political theorist. He published over 150 works, and conducted experiments in several areas of science. Priestley is credited with his independent discovery of oxygen by the thermal decomposition of mercuric oxide, having isolated it in 1774. During his lifetime, Priestley's considerable scientific reputation rested on his invention of carbonated water, his writings on electricity, and his discovery of several "airs" (gases), the most famous being what Priestley dubbed "dephlogisticated air" (oxygen). Priestley's determination to defend phlogiston theory and to reject what would become the chemical revolution eventually left him isolated within the scientific community. Priestley's science was ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Abolitionism In The United Kingdom
Abolitionism in the United Kingdom was the movement in the late 18th and early 19th centuries to end the practice of History of slavery, slavery, whether formal or informal, in the United Kingdom, the British Empire and the world, including ending the Atlantic slave trade. It was part of a wider abolitionism movement in Western Europe and the Americas. The trade of slaves was made illegal throughout the British Empire by 1937, with Nigeria and Bahrain being the last British territories to abolish slavery. Origins In the 17th and early 18th centuries, English Quakers and a few evangelical religious groups condemned slavery (by then applied mostly to Africans) as un-Christian. A few secular thinkers of the Age of Enlightenment, Enlightenment criticised it for violating the rights of man. James Edward Oglethorpe was the first to act on the Enlightenment case against slavery on humanistic grounds. In his "Georgia Experiment" he convinced Parliament to ban slavery in his Province o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
James Keir
James Keir FRS (20 September 1735 – 11 October 1820) was a Scottish chemist, geologist, industrialist, and inventor, and an important member of the Lunar Society of Birmingham. Life and work Keir was born in Stirlingshire, Scotland, in 1735 as the 18th child of Magdaline Lind (aunt of James Lind) and John Keir. He attended the Royal High School, Edinburgh, and studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh where he met and formed a lasting friendship with Erasmus Darwin. At the age of 22, Keir joined the army and was commissioned into the 61st Regiment (now the Gloucestershire Regiment). During the seven years' war he was stationed with his regiment in the West Indies. He became lieutenant on, 31 March 1759, captain-lieutenant on 16 May 1766, and captain on 23 June of the same year. In the spring of 1768 he resigned his commission, being disappointed at not meeting with more sympathy in his studies from his brother-officers. He found, however, one congenial friend in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Christoph Meiners
Christoph Meiners (31 July 1747 – 1 May 1810) was a German racialist, philosopher, historian, and writer born in Warstade. He supported the polygenist theory of human origins. He was a member of the Göttingen school of history. Biography Christoph Meiners was born in Warstade (now a part of Hemmoor) near Otterndorf. He started at a gymnasium in Bremen in 1763, and was a student at Göttingen from 1767 to 1770. In 1772 he became extraordinary professor, and in 1775 full professor, of ''Weltweisheit'' at the University of Göttingen. From 1788 to 1791 he co-edited the anti- Kantian journal ''Philosophische Bibliothek''. He wrote on comparative history and cultural history. He is now known mostly for his critical attitude towards Immanuel Kant, Mary Wollstonecraft and the concept of Enlightenment. He died in Göttingen. He later became the favorite intellectual ancestor of the Nazis. Polygenism Meiners was a polygenist: he believed that each race had a separate origi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jacob Joseph Winterl
Jacob, later known as Israel, is a Patriarchs (Bible), Hebrew patriarch of the Abrahamic religions. He first appears in the Torah, where he is described in the Book of Genesis as a son of Isaac and Rebecca. Accordingly, alongside his older fraternal twin brother Esau, Jacob's paternal grandparents are Abraham and Sarah and his maternal grandfather is Bethuel, whose wife is not mentioned. He is said to have bought Esau's birthright and, with his mother's help, deceived his aging father to bless him instead of Esau. Then, following a severe drought in his homeland Canaan, Jacob and his descendants migrated to neighbouring Biblical Egypt, Egypt through the efforts of his son Joseph (Genesis), Joseph, who had become a confidant of the Pharaohs in the Bible, pharaoh. After dying in Egypt at the age of 147, he is supposed to have been buried in the Cave of Machpelah in Hebron. Per the Hebrew Bible, Jacob's progeny were beget by four women: his wives (and maternal cousins) Leah and Rach ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John Ferriar
John Ferriar (1761 – 4 February 1815) was a Scottish physician and a poet, most noted for his leadership of the Manchester Infirmary, and his studies of the causes of diseases such as typhoid. Background Ferriar was born near Jedburgh, Roxburghshire in 1761. He obtained his MD at the University of Edinburgh in 1781, and became a physician (and later senior physician) at the Manchester Infirmary, from 1789 until 1815. He was a founder of the Portico Library and acted as its first Chairman alongside its first Secretary, Peter Mark Roget. He was elected to membership of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society on 12 April 1786 and Secretary of the Society 1787–92 Manchester Board of Health In 1795, he helped to set up a Board of Health in Manchester which rented houses in Portland Street for use as a fever hospital. He described to the Committee for the Regulation of the Police the appalling living conditions of the poor in cellars without lighting, sanitation or ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Adam Smith
Adam Smith (baptised 1723 – 17 July 1790) was a Scottish economist and philosopher who was a pioneer in the field of political economy and key figure during the Scottish Enlightenment. Seen by some as the "father of economics"——— or the "father of capitalism".———— He is known for two classic works: ''The Theory of Moral Sentiments'' (1759) and ''The Wealth of Nations, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations'' (1776). The latter, often abbreviated as ''The Wealth of Nations'', is regarded as his ''magnum opus'', marking the inception of modern economic scholarship as a comprehensive system and an academic discipline. Smith refuses to explain the distribution of wealth and power in terms of divine will and instead appeals to natural, political, social, economic, legal, environmental and technological factors, as well as the interactions among them. The work is notable for its contribution to economic theory, particularly in its exposition o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
