Private Toll Roads: Learning from the 19th Century

Lessons From Private Financing of Transport Infrastructure: Dutch Infrastructure in the 19th Century and European Projects in the 20th Century

In the past decade serious doubts have been expressed on the efficiency of a strong public financial involvement in infrastructure. This provokes the question whether financing of infrastructure should be a task of the government. For this purpose, the paper first presents a concise theoretical overview under which circumstances there is a case for public intervention. Interestingly, the financ...

The 19th Century

Coulomb, Carl Friedrich Gauss, André Marie Ampère, and Michael Faraday discovered the four experimental laws concerning electricity and magnetism, James Clerk Maxwell added the displacement current and thereby created the great set of Maxwell’s equations. That view is not entirely wrong, but it obscures the subtle interplay between sophisticated geometrical and physical intuitions that led not ...

The Chronicle of Arsenic Poisoning in the 19th Century

19th century South America

This basic socio-cultural framework, with all its inherent ambivalences and contradictions, emerged during the colonial era and exercised a deep and lasting impact on the political, economic and social structure of the new South American nations. Only after many decades was the impact blurred by the action of other external influences, change occurring from within, and a growing sense of nation...

Chronicle of Datura Toxicity in the 18th and 19th Century

Background: Datura stramonium is a poisonous and common flowering plant that is a member of the Solanacae family. Datura poisonings are a rare occurrence in the 21st century, making toxicological information on this plant sparse. Historical information on Datura provides useful information on the clinical symptoms and characteristics of poisonings. This review looks at the state of knowledge on...