Abstract
Founded 200 years ago, the Royal Institution has been and continues to be the site of a large number of major chemical and physical discoveries. Such work includes Humphry Davy's discovery of several chemical elements and his invention of the miners’ safety lamp, Michael Faraday's fundamental discoveries in electromagnetism (including the manufacture of the first electric motor, transformer, and dynamo and the development of field theory) as well as his liquefaction of gases and discovery of benzene, John Tyndall's pioneering efforts in understanding why the sky is blue and how glaciers behave, and, more recently, the crucial contributions made to crystallography by William and Lawrence Bragg. The Royal Institution is also a place where science has been brought to the public over the past two centuries through a variety of popular lecture courses. Davy, Faraday, Tyndall, and the Braggs not only undertook research, but were also scientific communicators of the first rank who would frequently lecture to an audience of more than a thousand in the Royal Institution's lecture theatre. One of the courses Faraday founded was the Christmas lectures for young people which continue to this day and are now televised, reaching an audience of millions. How all this came to be achieved in an eighteenth century town house in Mayfair is the subject of this paper.
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