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Metal ingots
Three metal alloy ingots and one aluminium ingot. All four are stamped 'BELL BROTHERS'.
These ingots comes from a 15-drawer cabinet found in the Herschel family home in the 1950s. The contents of this and a similar cabinet seem to suggest that they were used by successive generations of the family to store specimens, material and apparatus for carrying out experiments.
Aluminium is a relatively new metal, only having been isolated in the early 19th century (before that it existed only within compounds). Alexander Stewart Herschel writes to his father in around 1854, just before going up to Cambridge that he is 'reading whatever I can find about aluminium'. From this evidence these ingots have been linked with Alexander.
These ingots comes from a 15-drawer cabinet found in the Herschel family home in the 1950s. The contents of this and a similar cabinet seem to suggest that they were used by successive generations of the family to store specimens, material and apparatus for carrying out experiments.
Aluminium is a relatively new metal, only having been isolated in the early 19th century (before that it existed only within compounds). Alexander Stewart Herschel writes to his father in around 1854, just before going up to Cambridge that he is 'reading whatever I can find about aluminium'. From this evidence these ingots have been linked with Alexander.
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