This book describes the history of platinum and its associated metals, covering important discoveries and scientific work on the platinum group metals up to the early twentieth century. With twenty-four chapters, 450 pages, over 600 references and 235 illustrations (20 in colour) including 100 portraits, “A History of Platinum and its Allied Metals” by Donald McDonald and Leslie B. Hunt is the definitive description of how science was able to progress by means of the unique properties of these metals.
South Africa and the Global Hydrogen Economy is the publication of a MISTRA research project on the use of strategic minerals in the global putative hydrogen economy. The book highlights the global significance of platinum group metals (PGM) and explores the strategic opportunities that arise out of South Africa's endowment of these strategic resources. From their extraction to their applications in fuel cells, what options are available for the country, the region and the world to better leverage this endowment towards supporting growth and development objectives? In view of their expanding range of applications, do PGM need the hydrogen economy? Conversely, does the hydrogen economy need PGM? Addressed to all industry stakeholders, including those in the public and private sectors, the options explored in this book are based on a thorough analysis of the global dynamics that should inform policy and business models related to PGM.
Access to new plants and consumer goods such as sugar, tobacco, and chocolate from the beginning of the sixteenth century onwards would massively change the way people lived, especially in how and what they consumed. While global markets were consequently formed and provided access to these new commodities that increasingly became important in the ‘Old World’, especially with regard to the establishment early modern consumer societies. This book brings together specialists from a range of historical fields to analyse the establishment of these commodity chains from the Americas to Europe as well as their cultural implications.
Famous for its history of numerous element discoverers, Sweden is the origin of this comprehensive encylopedia of the elements. It provides both an important database for professionals as well as detailed reading ranging from historical facts, discoverers' portraits, colour plates of mineral types, natural occurrences, and industrial figures to winning and refining processes, biological roles and applications in modern chemistry, engineering and industry. Elemental data is presented in fact tables which include numerous physical and thermodynamic properties, isotope lists, radiation absorption characteristics, NMR parameters, and others. Further pertinent data is supplied in additional tables throughout the text. Published in Swedish in three volumes from 1998 to 2000, the contents have been revised and expanded by the author for this English edition.
In this book two distinguished metallurgists have traced the role of metallurgical technology in the creation of the scientific revolution and the formation of the Royal Society.
An interdisciplinary history of standardized measurements. Measurement is all around us—from the circumference of a pizza to the square footage of an apartment, from the length of a newborn baby to the number of miles between neighboring towns. Whether inches or miles, centimeters or kilometers, measures of distance stand at the very foundation of everything we do, so much so that we take them for granted. Yet, this has not always been the case. This book reaches back to medieval Italy to speak of a time when measurements were displayed in the open, showing how such a deceptively simple innovation triggered a chain of cultural transformations whose consequences are visible today on a global scale. Drawing from literary works and frescoes, architectural surveys, and legal compilations, Emanuele Lugli offers a history of material practices widely overlooked by historians. He argues that the public display of measurements in Italy’s newly formed city republics not only laid the foundation for now centuries-old practices of making, but also helped to legitimize local governments and shore up church power, buttressing fantasies of exactitude and certainty that linger to this day. This ambitious, truly interdisciplinary book explains how measurements, rather than being mere descriptors of the real, themselves work as powerful molds of ideas, affecting our notions of what we consider similar, accurate, and truthful.
As the official architects of Napoleon, Charles Percier (1764–1838) and Pierre-François-Léonard Fontaine (1762–1853) designed interiors that responded to the radical ideologies and collective forms of destruction that took place during the French Revolution. The architects visualized new forms of imperial sovereignty by inverting the symbols of monarchy and revolution, constructing meeting rooms resembling military encampments and gilded thrones that replaced the Bourbon lily with Napoleonic bees. Yet in the wake of political struggle, each foundation stone that the architects laid for the new imperial regime was accompanied by an awareness of the contingent nature of sovereign power. Contributing fresh perspectives on the architecture, decorative arts, and visual culture of revolutionary France, this book explores how Percier and Fontaine’s desire to build structures of permanence and their inadvertent reliance upon temporary architectural forms shaped a new awareness of time, memory, and modern political identity in France.
Winner of the 2011 BMA book awards: medicine categoryIn the five decades since its first publication, Hunter's Diseases of Occupations has remained the pre-eminent text on diseases caused by work, universally recognized as the most authoritative source of information in the field. It is an important guide for doctors in all disciplines who may
This volume moves chemical instruments and experiments into the foreground of historical concern, in line with the emphasis on practice that characterizes current work on other fields of science and engineering.
