Science & Technology

Uniquely of engineers, the reputation of Brunel lives on, commemorated by a university, dockyards, steamships, and countless other works of his discipline. But what, asks Walter Minchinton, were his achievements?

Not until the second decade of the twentieth century, writes Alun C. Davies, was a standardised method of time-keeping established throughout Britain.

D.L.B. Hartley describes the background to a postwar transatlantic aviation competition, famously won by Alcock and Brown’s Vickers Vimy aeroplane.

Plants have been hunted since the days of the Pharaohs, writes William Seymour; but, in more recent times, two resolute Scottish botanists led particularly adventurous and courageous lives.

Andrew Allen describes how the toad owes its relationship with witchcraft to the virulent poisons that its warty skin produces.

J.J.N. McGurk profiles Roger Bacon; a 13-century Franciscan, with a reputation as a necromancer, who showed a remarkable combination at Oxford and in Paris of philosophic and scientific gifts.

Michael Langley describes how, until a mid-eighteenth century innovation, navigators seldom knew exactly where they were when at sea.

Raymond Lamont Brown describes how this professional soldier’s greatest achievement was a splendid feat of peace-time engineering along lines that he himself laid down.

David Patten describes how the breech-loading rifle was newly used during the American War of Independence and how its founder Patrick Ferguson himself was slain in North Carolina, 1780.

Letha Musgrave introduces William of Ockham  a native of Surrey, the Franciscan scientist and philosopher who was deeply involved during his own lifetime in the politics of medieval Church and State.