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French conductor

One of the debates at the1864 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, in Bath, argued whether lightning conductors were better made of iron or copper. A Frenchman burst into the proceedings saying that they were going to solve this problem by building the biggest lightning conductor ever seen.

Curatorial Curiosities

pallasite, a stony-iron meteorite

Stony-iron Meteorite: Consisting of planet core and mantle materials, peridot olivine crystals in an iron-nickel matrix, there are only 61 Pallasites known. This is a small section of the first ever found: in 1772 German naturalist Peter Pallas studied a 680kg specimen found near Krasnoyarsk in the mountains of Siberia. Our small section was given to us by the antiquarian and traveller Sir Richard Colt Hoare, 2nd Baronet FRS (1758 – 1838).