{"id":311,"date":"2011-01-14T01:00:34","date_gmt":"2011-01-14T06:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/libraries.mit.edu\/150books\/?p=311"},"modified":"2023-07-07T16:27:17","modified_gmt":"2023-07-07T16:27:17","slug":"1868","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/libraries.mit.edu\/150books\/2011\/01\/14\/1868\/","title":{"rendered":"Year 8 – 1868: Scientific Amusements for Young People: Comprising Chemistry, Crystallization, Coloured Fires, Curious Experiments, Optics, Camera Obscura, Microscope, Kaleidoscope, Magic Lantern, Electricity, Galvanism, Magnetism, Aerostation, Arithmetic, etc. by John Henry Pepper"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Title<\/a><\/p>\n

Published: London, ca. 1868<\/p>\n

In mid-19th-century Britain, as the Industrial Revolution flourished and the empire prospered, popularized science and natural history became increasingly favored forms of entertainment for the growing middle classes. National \"\"<\/a>museums, world\u2019s fairs and expositions, and public lectures and demonstrations showed off imperial spoils as well as sharing \u201cuseful knowledge\u201d and the output of the emerging scientific professions.<\/p>\n

At the same time, children\u2019s literature was taking off to meet growing demand for educational material. Publishers like Routledge rose to meet this demand, producing such books as Papers for Thoughtful Girls<\/em>, Jabez Hogg on the Microscope<\/em>, Rev. J.G. Wood\u2019s Our Garden Friends and Foes<\/em>, and this small volume by John Henry Pepper.\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In a fashion similar to publications like Boys\u2019 Own Magazine <\/em>and The Boy\u2019s Journal <\/em> in the 1850s and 1860s, this book describes home experiments for kids\u2019 fun and edification. With \u201cabove One Hundred Illustrations,\u201d Pepper instructs his readers on experiments about \u201cSounds obtained by burning Hydrogen under Glass Tubes\u201d and \u201cSparks Drawn from the Nose\u201d (which is just what it sounds like) and shows how \u201cTo Melt a Coin in a Nut-shell\u201d and \u201cTo make Magnets with Poker and Tongs.\u201d Pepper introduces the book with a cautionary tale about a little boy whose face got in the way of a mortar filled with exploding phosphorus and chlorate of potash (\u201cjuvenile philosophers\u201d should \u201cavoid those results that merely end in explosions\u201d). Nonetheless, one doubts that kits based on many of his suggested experiments would make it past the Consumer Product Safety Commission today.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>This was not John Henry Pepper\u2019s only effort to bring science to the people or, more specifically, to youngsters. He also wrote The Boy’s Playbook of Science<\/em>, among others, and he ran classes and delivered lectures with demonstrations of experiments, illusions, and magic-lantern displays. Pepper is also noted for perfecting and popularizing an apparatus that created the illusion of a spectral figure of an actor, a technique known as \u201cPepper\u2019s ghost.\u201d<\/p>\n

Find it in the library<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Published: London, ca. 1868 In mid-19th-century Britain, as the Industrial Revolution flourished and the empire prospered, popularized science and natural history became increasingly favored forms of entertainment for the growing middle classes. National museums, world\u2019s fairs and expositions, and public lectures and demonstrations showed off imperial spoils as well as sharing \u201cuseful knowledge\u201d and the output of the emerging scientific professions. At the same time, children\u2019s literature was taking off to meet growing demand for educational material. Publishers like Routledge rose to meet this demand, producing such books as Papers for Thoughtful Girls, Jabez Hogg on the Microscope, Rev. J.G. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":false,"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-311","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/libraries.mit.edu\/150books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/libraries.mit.edu\/150books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/libraries.mit.edu\/150books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libraries.mit.edu\/150books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libraries.mit.edu\/150books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=311"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/libraries.mit.edu\/150books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4194,"href":"https:\/\/libraries.mit.edu\/150books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311\/revisions\/4194"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/libraries.mit.edu\/150books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=311"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libraries.mit.edu\/150books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=311"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libraries.mit.edu\/150books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=311"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}