My First Day in London

I shall never forget, as long as I live, the day when I first set foot in London. I came from a quiet little town in Switzerland and I had never before lived in a big city, so London was a new world to me and I was dying to find out more about it¹ for myself.

The general opinion abroad is that London has fog or rain, or both every day of the year, but on the day that I arrived it was fine and warm, the sun was shining brightly and the sky was cloudless. The next day was just as beautiful; a slight wind was blowing and you could smell the spring in the air. I went for a walk in Kensington Gardens. I found the way there quite easily. When I got my first sight of the gardens² the beauty of it took my breath away³. The trees were just bursting into leaf, fresh and green⁴, and there were beds of spring flowers, red and yellow and blue. People in light spring clothes were walking about, and to my surprise, they were walking not only along the paths but also across the grass. I passed a pool in which ducks were swimming: children were playing in playgrounds.

It was time for me to go home, but which way was it? I hurriedly turned down one path that I thought would take me back⁵ — and found myself in Hyde Park. I ran to the left and to the right, asked several men for the way to the street where I had stayed, but I found to my horror that I could not understand a single word they said in reply. I wandered on till I came to a big open place where men were standing on a chair, or on a platform, or on the ground. They were speaking or preaching, and people of all kinds were listening or asking questions or making remarks and sometimes laughing at the speaker. Other groups were singing loud. This was the famous Hyde Park meeting. Meanwhile, the sun went behind the cloud, I was terribly tired. At last I got to the park gate and came out into the street, but this was worse than ever⁶. Motorcars, bicycles, buses were running, people were climbing in buses or hurrying along. In despair I crossed the street on to an island ⁷ where I found a policeman who explained the way to me.

Notes

Benjamin Franklin

Benjamin Franklin, American statesman¹, printer, scientist², inventor, and writer, was born³ about three hundred years ago in Boston, Massachusetts. At the time of his birth, 1706, Massachusetts was still a colony and the United States had not yet become an independent nation. At that time candles were used for lights in houses and Franklin's father was a candlemaker. Benjamin was the tenth of seventeen children. When he. was only ten years old he had to leave school⁴ to help his father.

Benjamin was not happy working in his father's candle shop, and so when he was thirteen his father sent him to Ben's elder brother where he became a printer. In these years he learned to write so well that he often wrote something for his brother's newspaper.

Franklin liked the work in the printing shop, but he did not get along very well with his brother⁵. At the age of seventeen⁶ he set out to make his own way in the world⁷. He went to New York, but not finding any work there, went to Philadelphia. He arrived there dirty and hungry.

Franklin began working in a printing shop in Philadelphia, but by 1729 he became the owner of a popular newspaper.

Franklin was greatly interested in electricity and is famous for flying a kite during a thunderstorm: thus he proved the connection of lightning with electricity. This was one of the many investigations, which won Franklin recognition⁸ as a scientist.

In Philadelphia Franklin founded⁹ the first public library in America. Franklin served his country¹⁰ as a statesman and as a diplomat. Benjamin Franklin died in 1790 when he was eighty-four years old.

Notes

D. I. Mendeleyev

D. I. Mendeleyev, the great Russian scientist, was born in Tobolsk in 1834. After finishing school at the age of 16 he went to St. Petersburg and entered the Pedagogical Institute. He graduated from the Institute in 1855. In 1866 Mendeleyev was appointed professor at the University where he gave a course of lectures on chemistry. His lectures were always listened to with great interest and attention. Even in a class of two hundred students everyone was able to follow his discussions from the beginning to the end.

Interesting experiments were made in his classes. Both he and his student-assistants worked long hours in preparing the demonstrations so that all would go well. ¹

At the University Mendeleyev taught classes in the morning. In the afternoon he made experiments in his two-room laboratory. At night Mendeleyev spent much of his time working with the cards on which he put down information about each of the chemical elements.

Mendeleyev made thousands of experiments with his own hands. He made thousands of calculations, wrote a lot of letters, studied many reports. Everything in the world that was known about the chemical elements Mendeleyev knew. For months, for years he searched for missing data. ²All those data were being brought together and grouped in a special way. In 1869 the description of more than 60 elements was completed, and Mendeleyev published his Periodic Table.

The Periodic Table is spoken of as the beginning of a new era in chemical thought.

In addition to this work Mendeleyev paid much attention to many subjects of an applied chemical nature He was the first to put forward the idea of studying the upper layers of the atmosphere.

Mendeleyev was elected member of many academies abroad. He died in February 1907 at the age of 75.

Notes

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