Credit: ©The Royal Society
    Image number: RS.21246

    ‘Experiment extraordinary’

    Date
    1837
    Creator
    Henry Thomas de la Beche (1796 - 1855, British) , Geologist
    Object type
    Archive reference number
    Material
    Dimensions
    height (page): 327mm
    width (page): 206mm
    height (drawing): 110mm
    width (drawing): 100mm
    Subject
    Description
    Sketch of an imaginary experiment featuring three miners in a mine shaft being pulled from their ladder to the wall behind ‘by polarity’.

    Inscribed ‘Experiment extraordinary’ above, with the associated description below: ‘On Wednesday last a gentleman well known to the scientific public was experimenting on the Electro-Magnetic suction of Copper Bottom North Lode, this action became so strongly developed in a shaft through which one of the experimenters were posted, and down which three miners were descending at the time, as to throw the latter suddenly, by polarity, from the latter to the north wall of the shaft […]’

    Segment from ‘The Mining Chronicle’, a spoof newspaper featuring lampoons of the Cornish mining and railway industries and the work of Robert Were Fox, created by Henry de la Beche. Item 124 in MS/710, a volume of Fox’s correspondence.

    Sir Henry Thomas De la Beche (1796-1855), British geologist, was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1819.

    Robert Were Fox (1789 - 1877), British geologist and physicist, was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1848.
    Associated place
    <The World>
       > Europe
          > United Kingdom
    Powered by CollectionsIndex+/CollectionsOnline