Wooden sphere attached to brass wire. The wire is slightly bent to a curve.

These models were used by J. Frederic Daniell, who became the first Professor of Chemistry at King's College London in 1831, to explain William Hyde Wollaston's (1766-1828) theories of crystallography. It is conjectured that they were the actual models used by Wollaston in his Bakerian lecture on his theories of crystallography, which he gave to the Royal Society in 1813 (Philosophical Transactions, 1813, p. 51). Wollaston showed how groups of atoms could form different crystal shapes while at the same time conforming to the prevailing binary theory of chemical combination. He also showed how this could explain the electrical properties of certain crystals.