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History records humanity's great scientific leaps forward, but what of the places that inspired them, or the locations that played host to these momentous events? Some are specially built to stimulate thought, such as Charles Darwin's peaceful woodland path; others were designed for exploration, such as the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University. Some places inspired by accident: stepping off the pavement in Russell Square, Leó Szilárd theorised nuclear chain reaction; navigating a foggy road preceded the invention of Catseyes. Wired tours some of the hidden locations that played a significant role in creating Britain's scientific heritage.
CatseyesQueensbury Road (the A647), West Yorkshire +53° 45' 5.72",-1° 52' 5.71"
One evening in 1933, Percy Shaw was driving home to Halifax from the Old Dolphin pub in Queensbury, West Yorkshire. At around 300m above sea level, the A647 was foggy and damp. Previously, Shaw had relied on the reflections of his car's headlights on the metal tramlines to guide him, but the trams had recently been discontinued and the lines dug up. That evening, his headlights were reflected in the eyes of a cat, giving him the idea for his 1935 invention. The Catseye design is still in use: four mirror-coated reflective lenses embedded in a rubber cap, which sits inside a metal base. If the Catseyes are run over, a wiper cleans them as they sink into the often water-filled base.
OxygenBowood House, Chippenham, Wiltshire +51° 25' 42.36", -2° 2' 15.77"
The 18th-century country estate of Bowood House is where Joseph Priestley discovered "dephlogisticated air", the gas now known as oxygen. He was a Unitarian minister, teacher, author, natural philosopher and, between 1773 and 1780, the librarian and literary companion of Lord Shelbourne. The earl built a laboratory at Bowood in which Priestley devised an experiment to focus the Sun's rays on to a sample of mercury oxide (HgO). This released a gas that, wrote Priestley, was "five or six times better than common air for the purpose of respiration, inflammation, and, I believe, every other use of common atmospherical air."
Natural SelectionDown House, Kent +51° 19' 52.13", +0° 3' 11.91"
Charles Darwin moved to Down House, near Biggin Hill in Kent, in September 1842 -- six years after he'd finished his around-the-world voyage aboard HMS Beagle. While there he commissioned a circular path in a small section of the seven-hectare grounds -- a tree-lined route used daily as his "thinking path". Walking circuits, Darwin pondered his theories, refining the ideas that would form his masterpiece, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859). The path remains, as does his "weed garden", a selection of foliage he used to test his hypothesis of natural selection. Charles Darwin died at Down House, aged 73.
Chain reactionsRussell Square, Holborn, London +51° 31' 18.65", -0 7' 28.44"
After the Nazis' rise to power in 1933, Jewish Hungarian physicist Leó Szilárd left Berlin for London. On the morning of September 12 that same year he read, in The Times, the words of physicist Ernest Rutherford: "...anyone who looked for a source of power in the transformation of the atom was talking moonshine."
Szilárd waited as traffic rushed along Southampton Row, Holborn. "I crossed the street," he recalled later. "It suddenly occurred to me that if we could find an element which is split by neutrons and which would emit two neutrons when it absorbed one neutron, such an element, if assembled in sufficiently large mass, could sustain a nuclear chain reaction."
DNACavendish Laboratory, Cambridge University +52° 12' 12.56", +0° 7' 7.72"
"We have discovered the secret of life," announced Francis Crick as he walked into The Eagle pub in Cambridge on February 28, 1953, flanked by James Watson. Crick referred to the pair's discovery of the structure of
DNA, theorised over in the Cavendish Laboratory. Earlier alumni of Cambridge, such as Isaac Newton, carried out their research in their colleges, as there had been no dedicated research lab. In 1874 William Cavendish, the university's chancellor, donated £6,300 to build one. The Cavendish has produced many notables including JJ Thomson, who discovered the electron in 1897; Francis Aston, who recognised isotopes; and Stephen Hawking.
Transatlantic transmissionPoldhu Wireless Station, Cornwall +50° 1' 47.15", -5° 15' 46.45"
Guglielmo Marconi had already been conducting wireless communication experiments for several years, but this field is where, on December 12, 1901, he sent the first transatlantic wireless transmission. Morse code for the letter S was transmitted from two 51m-high masts and received 3,500km away on what's now Signal Hill, in Newfoundland, Canada. "The chief question was whether wireless waves would be stopped by the curvature of the Earth," he noted. "The first and final answer came at 12:30 when I heard... dot... dot... dot." All that remains are outlines of the station's foundations and a modest monument to Marconi.
This article was taken from the May 2012 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
