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")

Transcript of William Armstrong's 1863 Address to the 33rd Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science

Vimeo video of speech enactment

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You can read more about him here:

Wikipedia: William Armstrong

https://williamarmstrong.info

And in Henrietta Heald's biography "Magician of the North".

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His speech inspired the first suggestion I know of for green hydrogen (renewables + electrolysis of water to make hydrogen): blogpost: History of green hydrogen.

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As well as providing impetus for Jevons' marvellous The Coal Question.

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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.

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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

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And here's a more readable version:

Transcript of William Armstrong's 1863 Address to the 33rd Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science

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!