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The third and final chapter on 1848 investigates satires on the special constable: mainly middle-class volunteers who were sworn in to assist the police in keeping order on 10 April, the day of the Chartists’ meeting on Kennington Common. The specials were the butt of humorous barbs after it quickly became clear that there had been an overreaction to the revolutionary threat. Satirical representations of the special revealed the middle-class body as overly domesticated, ill-equipped for physical conflict and profoundly un-heroic. I demonstrate how at this stressful moment Punch’s supposedly respectable cartoons came to traffic with the vulgar humour of ballads, lithographed satires and theatrical depictions of the shamed specials and their phallic, but pathetic, gutta percha truncheons. Questions of the performance of race and gender through black face and cross-dressing are touched upon to consider how the special, and also the Chartists’, were belittled in popular culture at this time. In sum, this chapter offers a different reading of 1848, which is typically seen as a moment of triumph for order and property as the middle-classes sided with the police and government to prevent revolt.

This entry describes the development of Morse code by Samuel Morse. It gives a background to Samuel Morse’s life. Also it describes the development of the electric telegraph on land and later using undersea cables. The significance of using gutta percha as electrical insulation for the undersea cables is described. The entry highlights that Morse code is, in fact, an early form of binary code. The entry describes the difference between gutta percha and natural rubber.

This chapter explains the rules for sending and receiving mail as a prisoner-of-war. Prisoners were restricted in how much mail they could write and receive. The interaction between Wesley and Kate is developed by the first letters written. Concerns of health and exchange are introduced and continue as themes throughout the book. Wesley even starts to send Kate “gutta-percha” jewelry made by the prisoners on the island.

The important postulate that intermolecular interactions are independent of extent of deformation leads directly to the conclusion that such interactions cannot contribute to an energy of elastic deformation ΔEel at constant volume. In the earliest theories of rubberlike elasticity, it was additionally assumed that, intramolecular contributions to ΔEel were likewise nil. In this idealization that the total ΔEel is zero, the elastic retractive force exhibited by a deformed polymer network would be entirely entropic in origin. At the molecular level, this would correspond, of course, to assuming all configurations of a network chain to be of exactly the same conformational energy and thus the average configuration to be independent of temperature. Under these circumstances, the dependence of stress on temperature is strikingly simple, as shown, for example, by the equation . . . f* = υkT/V (〈r2〉i/〈r2〉0)(α – α-2) . . . . . . (9.1) . . . that characterizes a polymer network in elongation where, it should be recalled, 〈r2〉i3/2 is proportional to the volume of the network. This additional assumption that 〈r2〉0 is independent of temperature would lead to the prediction that the elastic stress determined at constant volume and elongation α is directly proportional to the absolute temperature. Such network chains would be akin to the particles of an ideal gas, which would obey the equation of state p = nRT(1/V) and thus exhibit a pressure at constant deformation (1/V) likewise directly proportional to the temperature.