William Armstrong's 1863 admirable speech
First Posted: 2020.10.22, Last Revised: 2020.10.22, Author: Tom Brown
C. Darwin: an "admirable speech"
In 1863, William Armstrong advocates:
- end of coal
- efficiency
- electrification
- renewables (he developed first hydro power)
- open data
- technological learning ("tendency of progress is to quicken progress")
Vimeo video of speech enactment
You can read more about him here:
And in Henrietta Heald's biography "Magician of the North".
His speech inspired the first suggestion I know of for green hydrogen (renewables + electrolysis of water to make hydrogen): blogpost: History of green hydrogen.
As well as providing impetus for Jevons' marvellous The Coal Question.
There's a fun profile of him and his mansion at Cragside (where he built the first hydroelectric plant to power the lights) in this architectural documentary: Youtube: Jonathan Meades Abroad Again In Britain 04 Cragside House.
Here's a scan of the speech from the Report of the 33rd Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science:
Address by Sir William G. Armstrong
And here's a more readable version:
based on a correction of the automatic optical character recognition (OCR) from the Internet Archive text version, see GitHub repo:
GitHub: Armstrong's Admirable Speech
It's in the public domain, so feel free to copy!