Chemical Engineering Seminar Series : Prof. Kesava Rao

The wonder that was India: excerpts from Dharmapal’s book ‘Indian Science and Technology in the 18th Century’.

The Talk consists of excerpts taken from a collection edited by Dharmapal (1971). The book contains accounts by Europeans who lived in India in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The articles were painstakingly collected by Dharampal from various archives in England and India.  It is astonishing to learn from these accounts that our ancestors could apparently predict the motions of the planets (well before the advent of Newtonian mechanics). They had a good estimate of π (≈ 3927/1250 = 3.1416) and were aware of the binomial coefficients for integral values of the exponent (several centuries before the general case was stated without proof by Newton in 1676).

They were adept at inoculating people against smallpox (over 100 years before the introduction of inoculation in Britain), could make ice by exposing pans of water to the atmosphere, had a sound knowledge of agriculture practices, could make steel bars of good quality, and could perform plastic and other kinds of surgery.