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SOME SCIENTIFIC CENTRES. 
V.—THE CHEMICAL LABORATORY OF THE ROYAL 
INSTITUTION, 
ee record of the chemical laboratory of the Royal 
Institution is such as to give it an unique position 
among laboratories. The Royal Institution was estab- 
lished in Albemarle Street, London, in 1800, and had 
its origin in the work Count Rumford did for the poor at 
Munich—in fact, it first came into existence, in 1799, as 
the Rumford Institution. We are told that “its primary 
objects were models, workshops, and useful knowledge to 
benefit the poor ; and that lectures, researches and scien- 
tific experiments to amuse and interest the rich, and to 
advance science, were comparatively the secondary in- 
tention of its founder”—and yet the advancement of 
science has always been its chief function, and it is safe 
to say that no other single institution has so brilliant a 
record of successes. But we have only to think of 
Davy’s invention of the safety lamp and of Faraday’s 
electrical researches—of which the modern dynamo and 
electric traction are an outcome—to realise that, as a 
matter of fact, the researches carried out in the labor- 
atory of the Institution have served, in the most direct 
manner possible, to benefit the poor and to carry out 
Rumford’s true purpose, and this, too, in a manner and 
with a completeness which he could never have con- 
templated as in the least degree possible. It has proved 
to be, not merely “a public institution for diffusing the 
knowledge and facilitating the general introduction of 
useful mechanical inventions and improvements ”—but 
the birthplace of discoveries which have given rise to 
them. 
Writing from the Royal Institution to his daughter in 
March, 1801, Rumford said :—‘‘ We have found a nice 
able man for this place as lecturer [on chemistry], 
Humphrey Davy.” A few years later he was able to 
speak of Davy as the man “who by his eloquence and 
genius saved the Rumford Institution from an early 
death.” Davy did far more than lecture—from the 
outset he gave to the Institution its policy, by making 
it the home of research, and set an example of which it 
is impossible to exaggerate the importance. Davy was 
appointed in February, 1801. Volta had just made his 
great discovery ; as Davy phrases it, “ the voltaic battery 
was an alarm bell to experimenters in every part of 
Europe.” Nicholson and Carlisle made the discovery of 
the decomposition of water by the pile on April 30, 1800, 
Davy was at once attracted to the study of galvanism, 
and he treated of galvanic phenomena in his first course 
of lectures. The closing paragraph of the series of 
extracts from this course, published in vol. i. of the 
Journal of the Royal Institution under the date. 
September 1, 1801, is a happy forecast of the victories to 
be won by himself and others in the field of galvanism :— 
“But independent of the immediate applications of 
this science, much is to be hoped from the elucidations 
which it may bestow upon the kindred sciences. And a 
discovery so important as to excite our astonishment 
cannot fail of becoming at some period useful to society. 
All the different branches of human knowledge are inti- 
mately connected together, and theoretical improvements 
cannot well be made in them without being accompanied 
by practical advantages.” 
Davy’s initial triumph in this field was won in 1806, 
when he delivered the Bakerian lecture, “On some 
Chemical Agencies of Electricity.” The fact that the Insti- 
tute of France awarded him for this the prize founded by 
Napoleon for the most important discovery in galvanism, 
at a time when England and France were at war, is 
clear proof of the importance attached to his work by 
the scientific opinion of the time. In the following 
year came the great discovery of the alkali metals which 
immortalised his name. It is fair to say that previous 
NO. 1715, VOL. 66] 
NATURE 
[SEPTEMBER II, 1902 
workers had made but chance discoveries, but that 
Davy’s work was clearly based on theory ; in fact, that it 
laid the first theoretical foundations of electrochemical 
science. Davy laid great stress on the interdependence of 
chemical and electrical phenomena. Faraday, his suc- 
cessor, fully established by his researches their quantita- 
tive interrelationship, and formulated the laws which to 
the present day serve to guide us. The importance of 
these researches to chemical theory was dwelt on by 
Helmholtz, in 1881, in the Faraday memorial lecture 
which he delivered to the fellows of the Chemical Society 
in the theatre of the Royal Institution. The conception 
of valency as consequent on atomic charges of electricity 
deduced from Faraday’s researches, to which Helmholtz 
directed attention, has yet to be fully appreciated. The 
closing years of the century, we know, witnessed a re- 
markable development of electrochemical theory at the 
hands of Arrhenius and Van ’t Hoff; whether the hypo- 
thesis applied by these two philosophers be essentially 
true or not matters little—-it is sufficient that it has made 
the mathematical discussion of chemical phenomena 
possible, with a degree of accuracy and to an extent 
altogether remarkable. Modern electrochemical theory, 
however, is largely based on the discoveries made in the 
chemical laboratory of the Royal Institution, and this 
may well be regarded as the original home of both pure 
and applied electrochemical science. 
Davy was both professor of chemistry and director of 
the laboratory ; when Brande followed him as professor, 
Faraday became director of the laboratory and later on 
Fullerian professor of chemistry. Faraday’s chemical 
work has never been sufficiently appreciated, his electrical 
researches having overshadowed it. The skill displayed 
in his organic researches would do credit to a well- 
trained chemist at the present day-—and yet he was self- 
trained in such work and there were no precedents to 
guide him. From this point of view, on account of its 
completeness, the memoir in which the discovery of 
benzene was described by him in 1825 is altogether 
remarkable. The modern chemist thinks only of 
Kekulé in connection with benzene, but if the hexagon 
be the appropriate symbol to put on the shield of Kekulé’s 
memory, its shadow should at least hover in the atmo- 
sphere of the Royal Institution laboratory—especially as 
the present occupant of the Fullerian chair has won the 
right to have it put on his hatchment with nitrogen sub- 
stituted for carbon at one of the angles. In discovering 
benzene, Faraday laid the foundation-stone of the coal- 
tar colour industry. A second most important contri- 
bution to this industry was made by him in 1826 by the 
discovery of sulphonaphthalic acid. We rarely think of 
him as the father of sulphonic acids, or as the progenitor 
of the naphthols and the madder colours. Noone would 
have rejoiced more than Faraday over a 
story such as can now be told of benzene—o! the 
manner in which a large part of organic chemistry 
centres around it, and of the way in which with its aid 
the colour-producing power of Nature has been altogether 
outdone. 
Faraday’s work on the condensation of the gases will 
always stand unrivalled on account of the originality and 
simplicity of his methods and of its completeness ; its 
influence, we know, has been world-wide. 
At the beginning of his career at the Royal Institu- 
tion, Davy turned his attention to agricultural chemistry. 
He was in consequence engaged by the Board of Agri- 
culture, in 1802, to deliver a course of lectures to its 
members on the connection of chemistry with vegetable 
physiology. This he continued to do for ten years, and 
he thus laid the foundation of agricultural science in this 
country. Had so wise a proceeding been continued, 
agriculture might well have been in a far better position 
than it now is. 
Faraday also had technical proclivities, as shown by 
wondrous" 
