Books in Uncharted, Unexplored, and Unexplained: Scientific Advancements of the 19th Century series

He was a grade school dropout who grew up in a small country town. But Henry Bessemer would become one of the richest men in London and would help lay the foundation for the Industrial Revolution. As a youth, Henry discovered a natural talent for making things out of metal, including machines of all kinds. In all, Bessemer was credited with over 100 inventions. None was as important as the Bessemer process, a method to cheaply produce steel out of iron. Steel's light weight and strength made it the perfect building material for everything from buildings to railroad tracks. This is the story of how a quiet, unschooled young man became one of the greatest inventors of the 19th century.

On December 28, 1895, about 35 people in Paris, France, descended into a basement room. The overhead lights were turned off. The audience saw an image projected onto a white sheet on one of the walls. Suddenly the image began to move! This was the first public showing of a motion picture. The device that was used to film the subjects and then serve as a projector was known as a Cinématographe. It had been invented about a year earlier by a young Frenchman named Louis Lumière. Along with his brother Auguste, the two men became important pioneers in making movies. From this primitive beginning, movies have become one of the world's most popular entertainment forms.

The strange little man was unnaturally shy. He couldn’t stand looking anyone in the face. He was unable to bear meeting more than one person at a time, and ran away if too many people came near him. When he had to go out, he sat in the shadows of his carriage so that no one could see him. He wore the same old-fashioned outfit day after day. And he never, ever spoke to a woman. And yet Henry Cavendish was also a brilliant man who made one of the most important discoveries of the nineteenth century—hydrogen, among other things.

He loved to laugh. He loved to make up silly songs to make his students laugh, too. But he also loved to think, and find out the answers to scientific puzzles. It didn’t matter if the questions were asked by a seven year old boy or a famous scientist. J. J. Thomson thought that they were all worth answering. Of course, there was one little problem with his research: J. J. was brilliant, but he was also clumsy. Test tubes broke in his hands and experiments refused to work. Once a beaker even exploded in his face, nearly blinding him. But all those accidents didn’t stop him. He was a terrific professor. All his students loved him, and learned from him. And if J. J. had to build his own equipment so that he could examine the atom, then he would do it. And when he did, he would discover something about the atom that no one else had ever expected.

In 1815, there werent any computers. Electricity hadnt yet been discovered as a way to make things run. Calculating sums of numbers had to be done by hand. One mistake would mean adding everything up all over again. But English scientist Charles Babbage was planning to change all that. He planned to use his knowledge of mathematics and engineering to build a machine that would be able to work out the most complicated sums instantly. But someone would have to give it the right program to follow. Women werent supposed to know mathematics in his day. But Ada, Countess of Lovelace, was one of the best mathematicians. She became the first computer programmer. And Charles Babbage could become the father of computingif only he could overcome the biggest problem of all. It wasnt the lack of electric power. It wasnt the lack of modern equipment. Before he could succeed, Charles Babbage had to conquer himself.

At the age of eleven, the eldest son of an English cloth maker began to perform scientific experiments on spiders. The experiments ignited his interest in science, and the natural world and everything in it soon became his own personal laboratory. As an adult, his curiosity continued to burn bright and he became a well-respected scientist. The results of his experiments impacted the way modern scientists have come to understand everything from respiration and combustion to the composition of the human body and the Earths crust. Thats because the boy who once experimented with spiders had grown into the man who discovered the most abundant element on Earth. That man was Joseph Priestley, and the element he discovered was oxygen.

It was one of the greatest mysteries of mankind: how are traits passed from parent to child? Although philosophers and scientists from the earliest civilizations recognized that offspring carried traits from both parents, nobody understood the process responsible for heredity. It wasn't until a shy young Swiss chemist stumbled upon a new substance that the mystery began to be literally unraveled. Friedrich Miescher came from a distinguished family of physicians but turned to research for his life's work, worried that a hearing impairment would make it difficult to treat patients properly. Although Miescher would discover the key to heredity, nucleic acid, it would be many years before the importance of his discovery was fully appreciated. This book tells the great scientific detective story that resulted in the ultimate unveiling of deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA, as the genetic material responsible for heredity.