SUMMARY


I. England during the XIX century:


II. Conan Doyle: Literature and Sciences:

III. Evolutions:


Bibliography

Redox/Luminol/Chemiluminescence:

CNRS [en ligne] http://www.cnrs.fr/cnrs-images/chimieaulycee/THEMES/oxydo/reaction.htm
Le Web Pédagogique [en ligne] http://lewebpedagogique.com/blog/equation-doxydo-reduction-en-physique/
YouTube [en ligne] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRlC16lUaCs&feature=gv
Science in School [en ligne] http://www.scienceinschool.org/2011/issue19/chemiluminescence
Bluestar Forensic [en ligne] www.bluestar-forensic.com


Victorian Era:

Strategium [en ligne] http://www.strategium-alliance.com/histoire/lere-victorienne/
Herodote [en ligne] http://www.herodote.net/Victoria_1819_1901_-synthese-595.php
Tueurs en serie [en ligne] http://www.tueursenserie.org/article.php?id_article=8
Police Scientifique [en ligne] www.police-scientifique.com
E-Monsite [en ligne] http://luminol.e-monsite.com
CORNWELL Patricia, Jack L'éventreur: Affaire classée, Livre de Poche, 2004
E-Monsite [en ligne] http://chimio-bioluminescence.e-monsite.com

Doyle:

MOORE Owen, La police mène l'enquête, Edition Dunod, 2009
Free [en ligne] http://christophe.giordani.free.fr/sherlock/doyle.htm
L'internaute [en ligne] http://www.linternaute.com/histoire/annee/evenement/1887/1/a/48767/

Conclusion

In literature, Sherlock Holmes, the character of Conan Doyle, was able to solve crimes, murders and crime in a society where criminal had a prominent place, due to his logical deduction and his esperience more or less aleatory. He managed to discover a chemical process involving hydrogen peroxide which foams only when it is in presence of a catalysis, in this case the iron present in hemoglobin. Sherlock Holmes actually deserved his notoriety. Gradually, innovations in terms of technology led forensics to generate many changes. Adventures of the famous detective have been adapted to both cinema and TV shows, mainly American. Forensic have transformed thanks to chemists and engineers improving test equipments making them safer. Luminol became Blustar, which detects the presence of even the smallest particle of blood by turning into a glossy blue light.

III.3. Today's Entertainment

Everyone has already seen this bright blue light, sprayed onto a surface to detect any trace of blood, potentially source of evidence. TV shows will tend to show off this perfect example of forensic research. It is an important parrallel between the explanation of hydrogen peroxide in the books by Conan Doyle and the presence of luminol in popular anglo-saxon TV shows .

With the development of means of communication from the 1800s until nowadays, all sectors have been developed: communication between people by cellphones or the internet, news and sciences now accessible to all, but most of all culture and entertainment. Society is changing and what used to be theater and literature are getting replaced by film and television, on a worldwide scale. North and South America and Asia are emerging and gaining more and more power. From 1914 to 1975 the United States became the leading economic power, and the culture of this country had soon taken over all the Western world. Major American film industries invaded our big and small screens with successful series and big movies. Today whatever we see on TV is marked by this media empire. Currently, most of the programs that are programmed on our channels are American or Canadian. Some of them: NCIS, CSI, Bones... And it is through those shows that a part of the population developted an interest in criminology, forensic science and more generally in chemistry. This interest in current entertainment is more massive than the one people had in the past entertainments (theatre, literature) before in so far as this field is becoming extent and popularized. Affirming every family in England is in possession of a television might not be untrue. So a huge part of the population is discovering a field, although it is not representative of reality, which he had no access before: forensics.
First, this vision of the police science highlights another aspect and this can promote the creation of work in this field.
And last but not least, people realize that for better investigation's results, scientific research is essential, which can lead to investment in this area and anyway it will always augment ways to improve certain techniques such as the detection of blood.

III.2. Luminol Chemiluminescence


If hydrogen peroxide foam in presence of blood, luminol produces a glossy blue light, it's called luminol chemiluminescence. Chemiluminescence more generally refers to any chemical reaction that produces light. This reaction can be represented by:

A + B -> [I] * -> + LIGHT PRODUCT

With [I] * being a molecule in an excited state. This phenomenon allows different uses of the light, such as fluorescent bracelets or emergency light sources  but of course its most common use is trought luminol, to detect blood. But how is this light produced?

Luminol chemiluminescence is a redox phenomenon that is producing light, and a redox above all.

The reduction-oxidation of luminol involves hydrogen peroxide and luminol. The equation can be representated by this:


H2O2 + luminol -> H2O + X*

Two couples can be differentiated: H2O2/H2O and luminol/X*

As explained before, the reaction between H2O2 and H2O is a reduction, with H2O2 being the oxidant. Thus, the other half-equation has to be the oxidation, with the luminol being the reductant.

The reaction beetween H2O2 and luminol produces water and a species we called X*. The equation and the balancing being to complicated, we will focus on the products of the reactions. H2O is water, but what is this X*?

X* is th oxidant of luminol and actually a complexe ion we won't study: C8H5NO42- *

Though, we notice the asterisk. This asterisk means the ion is in an excited state, a high energy level.

Energy level are a quantum mechanical system which claims each atoms possess different energy levels: a stable ground state, with the lowest energy level. If it is at a higher energy level, it is said to be excited. Those species can be excited to a higher level by absorbing photons. Conversely, a decrease in energy level will result in the emission of a photon.

In our case, the species X is in an excited state because of the redox reaction. But once the reaction is done, it will return to a lower energy level by itself.

Returning to the ground state, its energy level will drop and a packet of energy (a photon) will be release in the form of electromagnetic radiation. The amount of energy will make the wavelenght vary, and when it is within the range of visible light, electromagnetic radiations are percieved as light of a particular colour determinated by the electromagnetic spectrum.

With luminol the electromagnetic radiation of the excited species has a wavelength of about 380 nm, this, explaining the blue colored light.

III.1. Luminol Discovery

With the evolution of communication and technical progress some parallels can be established between the evolution of entertainment and a progress in terms of scientific discovery, all of this lying in the forensic and criminal context.

To pursue the development of the last section on hydrogen peroxide, its advantages and its drawbacks, we will talk about the evolution of this process, or more precisely its successor: the luminol.

Hydrogen peroxide is, as we explained it, the first mean of blood detection. It was effective in certain measures only and showed dysfunction like many false positives. Researches has been done and led to the creation of luminol, a chemical process which is the most widely used today forensic sciences, that is to say, the research of evidences on a crime scene.

If this product is currently used, it has been discovered for about 200 years. Such an old discovery that many version of the luminol's story are merging. Everyone agrees with the fact that the creation of this product dates back to the late nineteenth century, but no uses were made back then. After this discovery theories are diverging. A large majority of person explains that it is the chemist H. Albrecht who discovered the reaction of luminol in presence of hydrogen peroxide, and which results in the production of a blue light and that by using a catalyst you could speed up the reaction. All of this has been found out by "accidentally" mixing those products. Still, other sources claim that it was in 1913 that the light generation which is called chemiluminescence of luminol was first noticed by Semper and Cuirtis and that they had mixed luminol with sodium hydroxide then with hydrogen peroxide. In 1936 several scientific including K. Gleu and K. Pfannstiel discovered that the catalyst, in other terms, the chemical species which accelerates the reaction between luminol and other chemical species, is contained in the heme component of hemoglobin because it contains an iron atom, the iron being the "real" catalyst. A year later W. Specht conducted wide and extensive studies on the reaction of luminol, and for the first time applied it to the blood detection on the crime scenes. He did several tests on different materials stained with blood. He and McGrath (1942) tested the mixture of luminol and hydrogen peroxide with various bodily fluids such as saliva, sweat, urine, etc... A few years later, Moody and Proesher kept on studying the structure and chemical properties of luminol reactions and tested preparations on both human and animal blood, already pointing out some false positives. Then, two of the most commonly used preparations are invented. The first one is from Grodsky in 1951, which includes as powder: luminol, sodium carbonate, sodium perborate, all dissolved in distilled water. This kit is quickly becoming the most used on crime scenes. Then appears a new composition combining luminol, sodium hydroxide, potassium hydroxide, hydrogen peroxide and distilled water. This one is created by Weber. Grodsky's preparation was the major one, but it soon began to present some flaws such as a really long time to start shining, or the toxicity of sodium perborate. Weber's preparation becomes increasingly used, since it also has advantages like the fact that it can be photographed in the complete darkness.

II.2. Redox and Hydrogen Peroxide


Hydrogen peroxide foams in presence of blood, this reaction is a redox. But what is "redox"?
The reduction-oxidation is a chemical reaction that can be sum up as a transfer of electron beetween two chemical species. Those can either be atoms, ions or molecules. The reason why electrons are moving from species to other is because they are mobile, lightweight and ubiquitous in all forms of matter. There are two half-equations: an oxidation and a reduction, both part of the overall equation, the reduction-oxidation. Each of them are representative of a "couple" composed by:

- A reductant, the species which loses electrons.
- An oxidant, the species which gains electrons.

But in this case, two things differ from this explanation:

- The fact that hydrogen peroxide reacts with itself.
- The presence of blood and its impact on the reaction.

Indeed, if you let hydrogen peroxide a certain time, the solution will dismutate and form oxygen and water. This is because hydrogen peroxide acts as the reductant and the oxidant at the same time. If we take a closer look to the hydrogen peroxide redox, we can, once again, observe  two half-equations, one for each couple.

- The first one is represented by:

H2O2(aq) -> O2(g)

This half-equation explains hydrogen peroxide is (slowly) turning into oxygen. To understand why, we need to balance the equation:

- The oxygens are already balanced.
- To balance the hydrogens, 2H+ are added to the products (O2).
- 2 electrons are added to balance the equation, which yields:

H2O2 -> O2 + 2H+ + 2è

This actually means H2O2 lost 2H+, thus 2 electrons, to form the O2 molecule. It's a loss of a electrons: the oxidation (where O2 is the oxidant)

The second half-equation represent the hydrogen peroxide transforming into water:

H2O2(aq) -> H2O(aq)

The equation need to be balanced:

- To balance the oxygens, 2 goes in front of H2O.
- 2H+ are added to the reactants (H2O2).
- 2 electrons are added to balance the equation:

H2O2 + 2H+ + 2è -> 2H2O

In this equation, H2O2 gains 2H+, thus 2 electrons, to become the H2O molecule. This is a gain of electrons: the reduction (where H2O is the reductant).

In conclusion we can see H2O2 acts both as a reductant (the species that loses electrons), in the first half-equation, and as an oxidant (the species that gains electrons) in the second half-equation. That's why the hydrogen peroxide is said and indeed reacts with itself, the (balanced and simplified) overall reaction being:

H2O2(aq) + H2O2(aq) + 2H+ +2è -> 2H2O(l) + O2(g) + 2H+ + 2è

The sign (aq) meaning aqueous, (g) for gas and (l) for liquid ((s) for solid).

The molecule H2O2 loses and gains 2 electrons and 2H+, canceling each other out.

The hydrogen peroxide is said to disproportionate and produces oxygen and water.

But in fact, this disproportionation takes a very long time. And this is where the blood intervenes:
In this chemical reaction, blood is a catalysis. A catalysis is a compound able to speed a chemical reaction. It's involved in the reaction but is not listed in the reactants or the products. It is generaly written up the reaction's arrow symbol.

Here, the catalysis is actually iron. More precisaly iron atoms, contained in heme: a  chemical compound present in hemoglobin.

When it is in contact with blood, hydrogen peroxide's reaction is immediate. And because the oxygen is separating from the water this quickely, the solution foams.


II.1. Literature of the XIX century (and Conan Doyle)

Detective novels were a new writing style, in relation with economic context and miserable life conditions. The first author was Edgar Poe, whose book Murders in the rue Morgue, became famous. In the story, Dupin Chevalier solves lots of mysterious situations only by logic thinking and mathematics reasoning. In relation with this character, we can consider he is Conan Doyle's ancestor.

Among his novels, Conan Doyle (1859-1930) presents Sherlock Holmes as a specialist of mathematic reasoning:  this is the way he works to investigations he must lead. By the way, the author didn’t appreciate his hero: he was always seen in a bad mood.



After medical studies, he had some financial difficulties as his wife was suffering from tuberculosis and the family had no money. He decided to write novels and the second one (A Study in Scarlet – 1887- ) was edited after many negotiations. He tried to write historic novels, poetic stories and political articles.


The world of Sherlock Holmes is very interesting: Sherlock can be analyzed as a very intelligent but alcoholic as hero obsessed with cocaine. It is a pity because Sherlock Holmes is described as tall and athletic, very clever and brilliant. His medical studies help him to imagine crimes and detective stories as Conan Doyle knew so many things about drugs and chemical.

Also he plays the violin very well. These qualities were more from his brother, a young slim and athletic man. It is still fuzzy about his declaration directed to the professor Joseph Bell explaining that his character was really a huge source of inspiration. So much that he wrote “it is certainly thanks to you that Sherlock Holmes was born. Around a core of deduction and observation that I heard you tried to teach, I tried to build a new man.” In his characters, there is also Watson, a doctor who looks like Conan Doyle's mother, for a sake of making the present part of the recite. She had delighted his childhood by telling wonderful stories, even those undertaken by Watson there to tell. Contemporary life flocking to him through the poorly attached windows of the 221b and then the 10 Baker Street. Events were more or less important and reflected in the adventures of Sherlock Holmes crossed the Victorian era and Edwardian the twentieth century and finally the First World War. His novels and short stories featuring the famous detective were all published between 1887 and 1930 in an English newspaper First, the Strand and then to the United States and finally almost internationally. Specifically, at this time that these newspaper subscriptions significantly augmented. In 1889, J. Marshall Stoddart, American publisher started to be interested in him. He did meet Oscar Wilde and make him publish in the U.S., where he soon became famous. In 1891, the Strand published Sherlock Holmes stories permanently. In the illustrated version, the designer was inspired by his own brother for Holmes. It was an international success. As in the myth Sherlock Holmes’ spreads, Conan Doyle developed a phobia towards his character, his personal life is very disturbed, especially by the huge postbag he daily received, readers loved this character, proposed investigation ridiculous, jokes to his account, the author exceeded by his work, he went on to say: "I ​​will kill him or he will kill me." Against all odds he decided to make Holmes fall off a cliff in the Final Problem in December 1893 in a duel in Switzerland. The reaction of the public does not expect twenty thousands subscribtion were terminated at the Strand. In August 1901, Doyle wrote a novel where it was missing a main character, he decided, far from him to resurrect, to present the detective in a new adventure but before his death. This is how The Hound of the Baskerville was born. Finally in September 1903, he decided to resume his writing, no longer resisting pressure from particular financial publishers. He did not resist the offer of a weekly American paper that proposed him $ 45,000 on the condition that Holmes resurrected. After two months of waiting, Empty House was published. "Relations" between the author and his character are still conflicting. Not attributing any value on the detective to his idea of a literary work, it nevertheless recounts the adventures of Holmes until 1928, just a year and a few months before his death. In the novels, Sherlock Holmes is part of the precursors of forensic medicine. Based on the quasi-infallibility of his observation, his analytical reasoning, Sherlock Holmes has the art of talk clues making using techniques drawing real criminals for example, blood tests. We do see in Study in Red, the second really important book by Conan Doyle, the evolution more or less described in the detection of blood. At the beginning of story, Sherlock Holmes shows his latest discovery, which is the replacement of guaiacum, former experience as unsafe coarse hydrogen peroxide. It, the appearance of pure water and reveals presence of blood just with a proportion of less than a millionth. However, we can't demonstrate the parallelism found between chemical changes and those of the detective. Indeed, the scientific method through research of the identification of people allowed the first branch of forensic science reveal traces of blood cleared by the perpetrator or the time. The pioneer in Europe was Mathieu Orfila (1787-1853) French physician and chemist who developed the first test to identify blood and was also the first to use the microscope to detect traces of biological origin such as blood. Then the German Christian Schönbein (1799-1868) observed the ability of hemoglobin to foam hydrogen peroxid water in 1863.


This is an experience to detect traces eventually made by a suspect on clothes:

The equipment required is as follows: oxygenated water, a dropper, a piece of cotton cloth, a blood sample collected on a steak.

Protocol: Dilute a few drops of blood in a little water. Soak a cloth about 20X20 in the diluted blood, wring and drop about a quarter. Wash it with water to remove the red marks. Allow the cloth, for example by placing it on a radiator. After drying, put the dropper with the drop of hydrogen peroxide in some parts of the cloth.

Observation: we note that effervescence forming a white drop appears in places where  hemoglobin is still attached to the tissue.

We'll see what happened in the next part, but to conclude this experience, we will notify in sum great presumption traces of blood, due to the formation of foam. This test is very sensitive but unreliable. It is no longer used as much more sensitive and specific are available today, we will focus on them later.

I.3. The Urban Suburb

During the Victorian area, the East End was a district isolated from the city of London. 900 000 people were living in very bad condition: they walked in excrements, lived with terrible smells because of the garbage and the sewers. Families lived in small rooms and the singles in overpopulated night shelters in terrible conditions there were approximately 200 night shelters accommodating 9,000 persons. Dormitories were constituted by rows of beds, infested with vermin and with insects. Most of the inhabitants of the East

End worked only occasionally for exhausting and not well paid jobs. They were criminal or unemployed persons of long time. They lived from day to day.


  Half the children died before the age of five and if they survive they were mentally or physically sick. There were numerous Orphans in the streets and some ended in brothels.

 The arrival of Jews, after a wave of immigration from the Eastern Europe towards London in 1880, had very beneficial effects on the district of Whitechapel, by improving sanitary conditions and the security.

However, in spite of numerous efforts of urban renewal and the improvement of the living conditions entailed by the Jewish immigration, Whitechapel was always a poor and criminal area.

 Prostitution was one of the only means of survival for a single woman because they were often exploited, badly paid and obliged to do extra hours. Prostitutes worked directly in the street, sank very often into alcoholism and were lucky if they avoided venereal diseases (syphilis, in particular). The procurers were many and treated the prostitutes contemptuously and with violence. They also risked to be aggressed by "gangs" of thieves which struck them to steal them their money if a woman had not won enough money to buy herself a bed for night, she had to find a man who would let her sleep with him in exchange for her sexual favors. Or else, she slept in the street.

 In the poverty of the overpopulated houses, in the dark and narrow alleys, the murderer of Whitechapel had found the perfect place to kill.

 It is in those conditions that Jack the Ripper; doubtless the most famous of all the serial killers:  killed five prostitutes in four months in the miserable district of Whitechapel, in 1888. He knifed them and mutilated them with a rare violence, and really burst out on his last victim. In spite of the long work of the police, he was never arrested. The craziest theories still run on his identity, and fascinate hundreds of "Ripperologues".

Uncountable books and movies were produced on his subject, offering each "the" solution of the enigma which will be never known.

 Curiously, the murders of the Ripper had positive consequences for the East End. As Stéphane Bourgoin explains it (The red book of Jack the Ripper)” fixed prices served as catalysts to unify the action of the reformers of any edges, thanks to the pressure of the public opinion, horrified by the descriptions contained in the press on the life of Whitechapel ".

 Streets, usually so dark as we saw there almost nothing, were much better lit(enlightened) by new lampposts. The dirty shanties were demolished from 1889 and new housing was reconstructed. The orphan children were not any more left with the street and we voted for laws so that they are protected.

However, East End remained another poor and dangerous area during decades.

I.2. The Dark Side of the XIX century

In the nineteenth century, the population of Great Britain increased a lot. She saw her population tripling at the end of the century. We think that it is because of immigration, in particular the large number of Irish immigrants, who faced unemployment and famine in their country, as well as in the fact that people lived much longer and that the children who generally died early , survived. Families were bigger.



 The population of cities very strongly increased. This because of the effects of the revolution. Some came to look for the work, others to look for a better lifestyle.

 Because of the population explosion, and immigration (foreign and domestic) people (that they were qualified or not) were looking for work. This entailed a rush on any available jobs.

 So that the family survived, the children had to help their parents to earn money. Some work in coal mines, the others sold things (flowers, matches)

 Housing had become rare and expensive. People needed housing close to work.

 Because of the overpopulation, houses were transformed into buildings. Only the owners did not care about the state of housing. Certain writers spoke about these conditions in their books, as Kellow Chesney in The

Victorian underworld which describes the condition of people in their housing:

 “Hideous slums, some of them acres wide, some no more than crannies of obscure misery, make up a substantial part of the, metropolis … In big, once handsome houses, thirty or more people of all ages may inhabit a single room,”

 We could pass of the wealth in the poverty in a few minutes .Indeed the beautiful houses of the rich were not very far from shanty towns and rookeries

 Poor people who did not have anything to drink were forced to take the water which flowed into the street, which looked like some liquid mud.

 Henry Mayhew writes in an article: “As we gazed in horror at it, we saw drains and sewers emptying their filthy contents into it; we saw a whole tier of doorless privies in the open road, common to men and women built over it; we heard bucket after bucket of filth splash into it” This one also writes an bookcalled London Labour London Poor where he writes in introduction: “…the condition of a class of people whose misery, ignorance, and vice, amidst all the immense wealth and great knowledge of “the first city in the world”, is, to say the very least, a national disgrace to us”

 In 1850 numerous persons would die because of the famine and of the poverty.

 Because of poverty and of the lack of food, many children were chased away from their home, but others ran away. They had to learn to manage alone. Many people were homeless.
But that they are alone or with them families,they all suffered from the lack of food and water as well as from a bad hygiene.

 Pamela Corde wrote in her book The Victorian town child: “In 1848 Lord Ashley referred to more than thirty thousand 'naked, filthy, roaming lawless and deserted children, in and around the metropolis'”.

 To survive many poor children stole. They were considered as a threat for society.

 Some people thought that by schooling them the problem would be settled .But others did not hold this view, as Henry Mayhew who says that : “since crime was not caused by illiteracy, it could not be cured by education the only certain effects are the emergence of has more skilful and sophisticated race of criminals”.

I.1. A New Era


The Victorian period corresponds to the years when Victorian the First was queen of the United Kingdom between 1837 1901. She was the granddaughter of the crazy king George the Third. At her birth she was not destined to reign because her father the Duke Edward of Kent was the fourth son of the king. Her father died when she was only few months old and three days before George the Third.

Victoria is therefore educated by her mother, Princess Victoria of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld , sister of the future king on Belgium .

Victoria was only 18 years old when she became queen on the United Kingdom, on 20th Jun in 1937. At this time the English Monarchy was in very bad shape. The Hanover dynasty (future Windsor) seemed discredited and suffers from the image that precedents king like Georges the Third or William the Fourth gave to the kingdom.
  
English society suffered from mutation generated by the second phase of the Industrial Revolution. There was a big gap between rich people and poor people which was denounced by the book “The Two Nations” by Benjamin Disraeli.  Democracy was almost inexistent and Universal vote was not established yet. Everything changed during the 64 years of Victoria’s reign. Just before her death, the Monarchy was immensely popular and the queen was at the head of the first world power and an empire spread over 1/4 of the Earth.

 On becoming queen, Victoria was trained in public affairs by the Prime Minister in office, Lord William Melbourne. She also married her cousin, a German: Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha the 10th of February in 1840. The couple has a beautiful family with nine children; this family offered to the Britannic people a nice picture of happiness.

The Royal family and the monarchy were at the top of their popularity when the Universal exposition in Crystal Palace is inaugurated in 1851. It was the first in this kind and was imagined by Prince Albert himself in order to demonstrate the magnificence and the hopes of the Industrial Revolution. This exhibition was very successful.


At that time London was the largest city of the world with 2.2 million inhabitants, the country has 22 millions of inhabitants: two times more than half a century before .

During the years 1850, social legislation was set up for example the obligation of weakly rest and the limitation of the child’s labor.

Numerous reactions were aroused because of the excesses of industrialization and the disfigurement of the living environment in particular novelist like Walter Scott or Charles Dickens who denounced the bad conditions of children. The upward social mobility by merit and work was possible even if the society was still hieratical.

Regarding religion a third of the Britannic population belonged to any religions, but they all shared the same social code.

At that time, Charles Darwin writ his book “The Origin of Species” ; a book about Natural selection which aroused less scientific theories regarding the "strongest" taking over the "weakest", allowing the justification of both colonialism and racism.

After Pell’s liberal government; a supporter of economic free trade, succeed at the head of the government two valuable Prime Ministers, but radically opposed of temperament and policy: the conservative Disraeli and the liberal Gladstone.

 At the end of the XIX century aristocracy began to turns away from commerce and neglect the formation of their engineers. So its leadership was disputed by Germany then the United States. Lord Salibusry, several times Prime Minister, had to face the economic difficulties, the protectionist barriers which limit the English exports and the more and more tightened international situation.

England has dominated the planet as no other nation before it, by leaning on the rule of law, the parliamentary democracy and the domination of seas.

 During Victoria’s reign, there were lots of little colonial wars in order to conquer new territory or to put in the reason the natives of the existing colonies:

So there were the “opium” wars: China had to open its ports to the occidental commerce. In India, after the cipayes revolt, England took the administration of the territory in 1857. London also imposed its protectorate in Egypt after the opening of the Suez Canal. To protect the route to India, and spreads its protectorate in Sudan after the battle of Omdurman, near Khartoum, where 8.000 British and 60.000 Sudanese dervishes.

They managed to dominate the world according to the imperialist views that Benjamin Disraeli expressed on June 24th, 1872, in London, at the Crystal Palace.  Prime Minister, burning supporter of the colonial conquests, offered to Victoria the title of empress’s India on January 1st, 1877.

Introduction

There are more and more English and American crime drama TV shows. Each of them talks about murder. For every murder the team is in charge of finding the cause of the death, as well as the murderer. To discover this, it is necessary to make DNA’s test in laboratory etc... Through these series the public is more and more interested in the science of the crimes (murders), etc... Chemistry played a large part in the criminal researches and for the police scientists, in particular with the discovery of the DNA, in 1953. But all this started well before. Exactly in the 1850s, when the living conditions were very difficult and where the crimes were many. The writer Sir Arthur Ignatus Conan Doyle, was one of the first to hint at science and more exactly at chemistry in the police. Indeed, in one his novels about it who stages the detective Sherlock Holmes he speaks. Conan Doyle was inspired by real English living conditions to write his novel. In it, Sherlock Holmes uses some hydrogen peroxide which allows to spot the blood. The hydrogen peroxide in this time is, in fact the equivalent of luminol in the 21th century, which is used on crime scenes. We see this technique appearing in English and American series. For example in the series CSI which stages a police team, solving murders.

We shall there come thus to wonder: to what extent the scientific researches of Sherlock Holmes have allowed the evolution of the detection of the blood?

At first we shall tilt us on the context of Jack the ripper, in particular during the Victorian era, the poverty and the bad living condition of the majority of the population urbanization and industrialization, the degradation of the society, Jack the ripper and the others criminals, then we shall speak about Sherlock Holmes and the hydrogen peroxide in particular the English literature, the discovery of the hydrogen peroxide and the chemistry (test, positive forgery), we shall continue with the luminol and the current English series with: the luminol, the series and the chemiluminescence.

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