Verses and Translations >CHARLES DARWIN'S SON'S COPY< C.[harles] S.[tuart] C.[alverley] Publication Date: 1885 Condition: Very Good

Title: Verses and Translations

Publisher: London - George Bell and Sons

Publication Date: 1885

Binding: Hardcover

Book Condition: Very Good

viii, 214 printed pages. Horace Darwin's signature on the front free endpaper. Tenth edition. Slight foxing. 12 x 18 cm. Original green cloth. Spine with gilt lettering above embossed gilt lyre player within oval border. Calverley (1831-84) had been expelled from Oxford), changed his name to Calverley and moved to Christ's College, Cambridge, where he was again successful in Latin verse, the only undergraduate to have won the Chancellor's prize at both universities. This book was previously owned by Horace, 5th son of CHARLES DARWIN and the youngest of his seven children who survived to adulthood. Having been encouraged to wander around the Welsh hills with his brother, Horace decided he did not want regular education and persuaded his father to have him tutored -he only just made it into Trinity College, Cambridge. Here he learnt physics and mathematics, taking his degree as a Senior Optime in 1874.
Immediately afterwards he entered the works of Messrs. Easton and Anderson and went through the ordinary apprenticeship course in the shops.
While there, for his father, he designed and built his first instrument, a klinostat, for demonstrating responses of a plant to the stimulus of gravitation. At the end
of his apprenticeship he returned to Cambridge, and shortly afterwards joined Dew Smith, who was engaged in designing and making instruments
for physiological investigations. Michael Foster had recently come to Cambridge,
at first as Trinity praelector in physiology, later as professor, and found that for nearly all the apparatus he required, only German instruments
were available. Darwin and Dew Smith became partners and became probably the first technology entrepreneurs of Cambridge when they started a business in 1881 which at a later date grew into the Cambridge Scientific Instrument Company, on Lensfield Road. The legacy of this company and of its founders is profound because it became a founding role-model for other companies to begin commercialising Cambridge University's scientific research. The business history of Cambridge started with Horace Darwin's company in 1881, then progressed to Pye (W.G.Pye left Darwin's company in 1886 to set up his own) and, via Chris Curry (who worked at Pye), continued to Sinclair and then Acorn. Darwin played an significant role in the development, design and use of scientific Instruments in aeronautics, height-finders and methods of locating aircraft to meet attack by air, gun sights, &c, and was knighted in 1918 for his services to the War. Impeccable provenance: purchased directly from Claire Barlow in 2018; Claire is herself a descendant of Charles Darwin, and she was disposing of her house & its contents in Wimpole Street, that had been passed down to her and her relations via Sir Thomas Barlow (1845-1945), Baron of Wimpole Street. Bookseller Inventory # 4302