As any steampunk will gleefully assure you , the Victorian era was a period of incredible breakthrough , where scientific breakthrough occurred at an astonishing rate . Which was the double-dyed environment for a book like Scientific Amusements to be published – a ragbag of science , phantasy , party tricks , naturalism , and more under a single banner .
Part of Harry Houdini’sincredible collection of books about science and spiritualism , a copy of Scientific Amusements was left to the Library of Congress , and is now digitalise and free for us to reckon through . Posted onthe rattling Public Domain Review , it ’s an fantastically wide - make book , that does very little to explain any of the science behind the amusement .
share of it are still classic skill experiment to this day — after all , it begins with a give-and-take of tidy sum and come down bodies . But some of the other sections are more like bar bets ( pageboy 7 ’s Match Problem ) , party tricks ( the useful to this day way of open a wine feeding bottle without a cork , page 25 ) , and the sorts of optic illusions that are still found in kid ’s science books .
But for the really fun stuff , have a gander at “ chemistry without a laboratory ” for a tour of at - house science that ’d be a lot arduous to get away with in this day and age .
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