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Electronic Discoveries
In 1800, the Italian Alessandro Volta built one of the first electric batteries, which he demonstrated to Napoleon. André Marie Ampère, laid the foundations for the science of electrodynamics with his discovery of the properties of magnetic fields produced by electric current.
Chemistry
Chemistry was moving toward a deeper understanding of chemicals at the molecular level. In England, John Dalton introduced the atomic theory, followed in 1808 by a published list of atomic weights and a new system of chemical symbols. The Austrian Johann Ritter discovered ultraviolet radiation.
The Natural World
Marie François Bichat emerged as one of the founders of modern anatomy. Through the use of dissection, anatomists were developing a clear idea of how the systems of the body worked for the first time.
Another Frenchman, Jean Baptiste Lamarck, the founder of invertebrate zoology, developed the first theory of evolution. He believed that giraffes developed long necks as a result of stretching to reach the higher branches of trees, and that this characteristic was passed on from generation to generation.
Georges Cuvier, established the science of palaeontology, becoming the first to classify fossils in the same way as living animals. In Britain, the amateur surveyor and fossil collector William Smith played his part in demolishing the religious dogma that God created the earth over 6 days in October 4004 BC. He did this based on his observations of how rock is laid down in layers, corresponding to successive periods of geological time. In so doing, he created the foundations for modern geology.
The Industrial World
The Industrial Revolution began in Britain in the late eighteenth century and soon spread throughout Europe. In 1808, Richard Trevithick, inventor of the steam engine, exhibited his 'catch-me-who-can' steam locomotive at a 'steam circus' in London, after inventing the first locomotive, 'puffing devil', in Cornwall in 1801. The age of steam trains was really born however in 1814 with the invention of smooth rail train's by Stevenson. John McAdam, meanwhile, constructed the first roads made from cambered, crushed stone in 1810.
In France, Joseph Marie Jacquard invented the Jacquard loom, where a system of punched cards works as a patternated template to weave cloth. This was the first step towards computer technology. In 1810, the Krupp Iron Works opens in Essen in Germany's Ruhr valley. In 1807, London's Pall Mall becomes the first street in the world to enjoy gas lighting, first developed by William Murdock in the mid-1790s.
Arms
The Napoleonic wars, and the war chest that fed it, created an arms race across both sides of the channel. One invention was Henry Shrapnel's exploding shell, which was soon adopted by the British army to devastating effect. In 1804 British rockets are fired to a height of 1,830 metres (6,004 feet) and in 1806 they were used for the first time in combat against the French at Boulogne. On the other side of the Atlantic, the US inventor Robert Fulton, built the first commercial steamship in 1807.
Medicine
Medicine was undergoing a transformation from little more than the barbaric surgery of the eighteenth century toward preventative medicine. Edward Jenner's experimental vaccine against smallpox, first developed in 1796, and practised on his young son, promised to revolutionise the approach to this devastating disease.
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