After 200,000 years of living in caves and bopping each other other the head with a club, us Homo Sapiens got our act together and began using our large brains to make specialist tools, organise our living space, move to less inhospitable areas and about 5000 years ago we developed cities, agriculture and trade and book shops and one inparticular in London where i began as a 14 year old apprentice with very little formal education.
My role was to bind the books and we did a lot of scientific books and one day i began to read some of the books that i was binding and found it interesting so read more and more and built up quite a decent knowledge so with all my book-smarts i asked London's best scientist, Humphrey Davy, for an assistants job but Humphrey declined my offer and to be fair to him, i was just a young guy with no education to speak of and absolutely no scientific experience who had read some books asking for a job with a world renown scientist.
Obviously something about me must have stuck in his mind because not long after he was doing an experiment with nitrogen trichloride and he got some in his eyes and damaged his eyesight so decided to employ me as his assistant afterall.
With all the medical equipment at my disposal, i set about inventing the electric motor, the electric generator, the Bunsen burner, electrolysis and electroplating and discovered electro-magnetic induction, benzene, magnetic fields, in short a lack of scientitific education was not such a problem because i discovered most of it.
Like most people i did have a special interest in the clathrate hydrate of chlorine and the British Government tried to recruit me create bigger and better chemical weapons for use in the Crimean War but as a pacifist i politely refused and concentrated on giving my lectures to non-science people
to try and get them interested in Science.
My legacy could be considered as one of the best scientists the world has ever seen but if i have inspired one person to study clathrate hydrate of chlorine (and why wouldn't they), then it was all worth it.
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