When he
showed that there was a sexual system in plants, church
authorities were so shocked that they suppressed this knowledge as
they did other scientific knowledge. In 1727, Rev. Stephen Hales
discovered the ways that water that plants lost by evaporation was
restored by the roots up the stems. He found that gas could be
obtained from plants by dry distillation and invented a way to
collect gases by heating certain substances. He made ventilators
for ships, prisons, and granaries, using the method of injecting
air with bellows. This saved many lives in the prisons.
Hans Sloane, the son of a receiver-general of taxes, who became a
physician, had collected hundreds of species of plants in Jamacia
while physician to its governor. He became physician to George II
and was a benefactor to many hospitals and devised a botanic
garden in London for the Society of Apothecaries.
In 1735, George Hadley, a London lawyer and philosopher,
determined that the cause of the trade winds blowing from the west
direction was the rotation of the earth. Benjamin Franklin in 1743
observed that a particularly violent storm was in Boston a day
after a particularly violent was in Philadelphia, and realized
that they were the same storm, even though the storm's surface
winds were from the northeast. He determined that Atlantic coastal
storms traveled from the southwest to the northeast.
In 1738 Daniel Bernoulli, a Swiss university lecturer in physics,
mechanics, medicine, and anatomy, showed that as the velocity of
horizontal fluid flow increases, its pressure decreases.
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