Richard Phillips to Faraday   3 June 1821

Dear Faraday,

Mr. Parkes, in his “Additional Observations on the Oil Question,” has extolled your “good sense and virtue for having resisted all solicitations to become one of the party”1 who replied to him. I will therefore thank you to inform me, whether, if such solicitations were resisted by you, it arose from any alteration in your opinion as to the danger of heating by the means of oil, the nature of the changes which it undergoes by heat, or as to the accuracy of the experiments made by yourself, or conjointly with others?

Yours, very sincerely | R. Phillips

June 3d, 1821.

1
Parkes (1821), 106. This and letter 137 form part of a controversy that raged between men of science over the conflicting scientific evidence given in the various Severn and King cases. See note 1, letter 110. Parkes appeared as an expert witness for Severn and King. See Fullmer (1980), 11.

Bibliography

FULLMER, June Z. (1980): “Technology, Chemistry, and the Law in Early 19th-Century England”, Tech. Cult., 21: 1-28.

PARKES, Samuel (1821): “Additional Observations respecting the Oil Question”, Quart. J. Sci., 11: 86-117.

Please cite as “Faraday0136,” in Ɛpsilon: The Michael Faraday Collection accessed on 27 April 2024, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/faraday/letters/Faraday0136