Historical Note
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Prince Ruperts Drops In London at the end of the 17th century, scientific toys were popular. Fashionable among them were curious, tadpoleshaped glass drops—known in England as Prince Rupert's Drops—that already had been tantalizing both the scientific and nonscientific intelligentsia in Europe since at least 1625. "This is to give notice that Drops known by the name of Prince Rupert's Drops are now made by Mr. Arthur Hewes and may be had at Mr. Jakemans at the Golden Still in the Old Bailey or at Mr. Goodwins Bookseller at the Queens-Head over against St. Dunstan's in Fleet Street," read an advertisement in an early October, 1695 edition of the London Gazette.
Procurement of these vitreous novelty items, which were sold in bottles (made presumably of normal glass), were followed by huddles of Londoners at pubs or around dinner tables whose participants then witnessed decidedly strange behavior for something as inanimate as glass. The antics of these little items were mystifying enough to have attracted the scientific attention of the early microscopist Robert Hooke who developed a partial explanation in the early 1660s. Prince Rupert's Drops, so-named because
the German prince presumably brought them to England, were made by letting molten drops of glass fall into cold water in which they would rapidly cool and solidify. Making them was hit or miss; many would disintegrate in the making. However, "Every one that Cracks not in the water and lies in it, till it be quite cold, is sure to be good," as Sir Robert Moray had recorded in 1661 when he was president of the then fledgling Royal Society in London. Successfully made drops most often took the form of a glass teardrop tapered over one or several inches to a pointed end. The most brow-furling trait of these small glass structures, and for which they gained fame, was the ability of their heads to withstand hammer blows, yet, if the tail were broken with the gentlest of finger pressure, they explosively disintegrated. The drops, known in Europe also as Holland Tears, were making rounds on such occasions as a dinner party on January 13, 1662 at the home of Samuel Pepys, the London diarist. This witty host apparently found the Royal Society's fuss over the drops worthy of satiric attention. In his 1663 poem "Hubridas," he wrote: Honour is like that glassy bubble That finds philosophers such trouble,
Whose least part crack'd the whole does fly And wits are crack'd, to find out why. After the initial experiments by the Royal Society, Robert Hooke undertook his own set of more systematic studies with the drops. By encasing drops in fish glue, for example, he was able to trigger disintegration of the drops yet preserve the fracture pattern for observation through his microscopes. In his Micrographia (1665), Hooke provides a beautiful illustration of a drop with many linear cracks angularly radiating from what appears to be a central spine out to the drop's surface. Hooke's theory, which has only been elaborated upon in recent years, held that the outermost portion of t
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