50 years ago

Charles Dupin, a French mathematician and naval engineer visiting Britain in 1816, was much struck by two brothers who worked in a bakehouse which they had equipped with portable gas-lights. In the intervals of baking bread, these two made a steam engine which they used in turn to make “des machines et des instruments de physique”. Their uncle (who apparently owned the bakehouse) was neither amused nor interested; according to Dupin, “il préfère de beaucoup la boulangerie et la pâtisserie à la gazometrie et l'astronomie”. These baking brothers, who symbolized for Dupin the incubation of technological zeal in Britain, were neither an isolated nor a new phenomenon... The steam-intellect societies had begun.

From Nature 1 March 1958.

100 YEARS AGO

Alcohol and the Human Body — The importance of the alcohol question to the well-being of the race can scarcely be exaggerated, and in many respects this book will be very useful, but it is questionable whether the authors do not go too far in ascribing to alcohol ill effects only... surely there is a consensus of opinion that the moderate use of good, well-matured spirit or wine is frequently beneficial in some disease conditions ... The experiments quoted, in which even weak solutions of alcohol are shown to be protoplasmic poisons, are hardly convincing as to the deleterious action of alcohol on the organism as a whole, for are not distilled water, 3 per cent. salt solution, and beef-tea similarly protoplasmic poisons? A good deal is made of the supposed disastrous effect of alcohol on the nervous system, and it is stated that alcohol is accountable for 20 per cent. of the cases under care in our asylums ... [but] in an American inquiry into the subject, total abstinence was found to be more frequently an antecedent of insanity than was intemperance.

From Nature 27 February 1908.