Materials

Bombo quarry columnar basalt.

The materials that first became living matter had been in existence since the beginning. They were simply brought together under circumstances that allowed their inherent energies to interact in a new way.
— Robert E. Snodgrass (1875 – 1962), Smithsonian Report, 1962

Who is the Potter, pray, and who the Pot?
— Omar Khayyam, Rubaiyat.

From the time of the Romans until the year 1813 practically all building in Paris was carried out using stone quarried from beneath the city streets. Toward the end of this long period, interior finish was of plaster also derived from the same unusually convenient local source. To begin with, access was gained to the limestone beds by driving in simple adits on the sloping ground where it was exposed. This operation was limited, however, with the result that much of the quarried stone was hoisted up into the centre of the city through specially excavated shafts, some of which can be seen today. The limestone was quarried from two levels and the gypsum from beneath the lower limestone quarry level.
— Robert F. Legget, Cities and Geology, McGraw-Hill, 1973, 340.

Hard is the stone, but harder still
The delicate preforming will
That guided by a dream alone,
Subdues and moulds the hardest stone.
— Oliver St John Gogarty (b. 1878), The Image-Maker.

Naval history has recently been written in terms of timber. Sooner or later it will become necessary to write it again in terms of gunpowder . For there can be no doubt that one factor in the English success at sea was the good quality of the powder used. It was pointed out in a letter to the Moniteur  that the powder burnt in the French fleet at the Battle of the Nile was adulterated by more than 25 per cent. This was naturally, perhaps rightly, attributed to the dishonesty of the contractors and the venality of the commissaries. Yet an exhaustive experiment at Bombay in 1808, with the powder used on each side in the action between the San Fiorenzo and the Piedmontaise, proved that the English powder was better … It is hard at least to believe that all of the dishonest contractors were on one side. And this suggests, again, that English powder may have owed its quality to the purity of Bengal saltpetre , of which England had a complete and permanent monopoly. The raw material was peculiar in the ease with which it was prepared for export, and perhaps it had other merits.
— C. Northcote Parkinson (1909 – 1993), Trade in Eastern Seas 1793-1813, 1937, 84.

The method practiced by the small farmers in Switzerland is very simple, requires little or no care, and is admirably adapted to the hilly portions of our State. A stable with a board floor is built on the slope of a hill (a northern slope is best), with one end resting on the ground, while the other is elevated, several feet, thus allowing the air to circulate freely below. Beneath the stable a pit, two or three feet deep, and conforming to the slope of the hill, is dug and filled with porous sand, mixed with ashes or old mortar. The urine of the animals is absorbed by the porous sand, becomes nitrified, and is fit for leaching in about two years. The exhausted earth is returned to the pit, to undergo the same process again. This leached earth induces nitrification much more rapidly than fresh earth; so that after the first crop the earth may be leached regularly every year. A moderate-sized stable yields with every leaching about one thousand pounds of saltpetre.
— Joseph LeConte (1823 – 1901), Instructions for the Manufacture of Saltpetre, 1862.

On the 12th February, 1873, the Society of Telegraph Engineers received a communication from one of its members (Mr. Willoughby Smith) to the effect that a stick of crystalline selenium, such as has been used for some time in telegraphy where electrical resistances were required, offered considerably less resistance to a battery current when exposed to light than when kept in the dark …

In approaching the sensitive selenium plate with a dark hot poker, no sensible effect is produced, whereas the same hot poker when brought near a Crookes’ radiometer causes it to revolve with great energy, showing that the latter instrument is much more dependent upon heat rays than selenium.
— Sir William Siemens (1823 – 1883), The Action of Light on Selenium, address to the Royal Institution, February 18, 1876.

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