Yesterday, the residents of Samoa began driving on the left side of the road instead of the right. This is the first major switch since the 1970s, when Ghana, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone made the change. Randy James of Time magazine has an article exploring how different nations came to use different sides of the road:
Theories differ, but there’s no doubt Napoleon was a major influence. The French have used the right since at least the late 18th century (there’s evidence of a Parisian “keep-right” law dating to 1794). Some say that before the French Revolution, aristocrats drove their carriages on the left, forcing the peasantry to the right. Amid the upheaval, fearful aristocrats sought to blend in with the proletariat by traveling on the right as well. Regardless of the origin, Napoleon brought right-hand traffic to the nations he conquered, including Russia, Switzerland and Germany. Hitler, in turn, ordered right-hand traffic in Czechoslovakia and Austria in the 1930s. Nations that escaped right-handed conquest, like Great Britain, preserved their left-handed tradition.
The Morris Museum in Morristown, New Jersey has a permanent display called “Musical Machines & Living Dolls”, featuring over 700 antique automata, including quite a few fancily-dressed mechanical monkeys from France.
Though largely lost on passing schoolchildren and tourists at the Morris Museum, these monkeys were once a scathing critique on French aristocracy. There is a monkey on a early sort of bicycle called a velocipede, a monkey harpist, a monkey violinist, two small monkey musicians, and an incredible monkey dandy under a large glass dome. All are dressed in fine silks with hair done up in the style of French Royalty. These automata were a post-French-revolution joke on the former rulers and current dandies of France. So popular was the theme of foolish aristocratic monkeys that it was common in French homes, and whole rooms were decorated around the theme.
Read more about the mechanical monkey fad at Curious Expeditions. Link
Americans, including myself, seem to be obsessed with flappers -as evidenced with the plethora of flapper costumes seen every Halloween. They were amazingly revolutionary for the time of course and we even learn about them in school. But we don’t learn much about these women in school, here are five fascinating facts about the flappers of the 1920s.
Flappers Completely Changed Social Standards For Women
While many feminists deplore flappers for throwing away all the progress made by the suffragettes, they made quite a bit of progress for women in other aspects. While most people know they were the first women to actually show off their legs, cut off their hair and even wear shorts, they did much more than that. In the Victorian era, it was unheard of for a woman to go to a bar, to drink or to smoke. Bars were places for men to escape their wives.
That all changed in the twenties – and not only because of prohibition. These young women also dated around, something that was unheard of in the past. Lastly, they were some of the first women to drive cars. (Source)
Where Flappers Got Their Name
The name was widely popularized after the release of the 1920’s movie The Flapper, but there are a whole lot of differing stories about where the word came from. My favorite story is also one of the more popular tales of the time, it claims the term came from groups of girls walking around in unbuckled galoshes that flapped around as they walked. For a humorous read on Flapper footwear, you may want to read the 1922 article by The New York Times, “Flappers Flaunt Fads in Footwear.” (Source)
Like F. Scott Fitzgerald? You May Actually Like His Wife’s Writing
While F. Scott Fitzgerald was a great writer, he was not entirely original. In fact, large portions of his books were actually stolen directly from his wife’s diary. In fact, the conclusion of This Side of Paradise has a soliloquy by the protagonist Amory Blaine that is taken word for word from Zelda Fitzgerald’s journal. After their marriage, many things that Zelda said or wrote continued to find their way into Scott’s books, particularly in the Great Gatsby. In a review of The Beautiful and The Damned, she wrote:
“It seems to me that on one page I recognized a portion of an old diary of mine which mysteriously disappeared shortly after my marriage, and also scraps of letters which, though considerably edited, sound to me vaguely familiar. In fact, Mr. Fitzgerald—I believe that is how he spells his name—seems to believe that plagiarism begins at home.”
Coco Chanel Single-Handedly Made Tans Fashionable
Before Coco Chanel stayed out too long one day while on vacation, fair, paper-white skin was the ideal shade for women. But she was so popular and stylish that after she accidentally received a tan on a 1923 cruise to Cannes, everyone else wanted one too. (Source)
They Weren’t Just American
French flappers outside a cafe Via Vintage Lulu [Flickr]
While commonly considered an American phenomenon, due in part to the rebellion against prohibition, flappers were more of a response to the increased independence gained by women during the first World War. As a result, many countries had flappers, including Japan, Germany, England and France. Obviously these women had far different social norms to rebel against, but the effect was much the same -short skirts, increased independence and a modernized view on sexuality. (Source)
Thomas Paine was a writer, agitator, Anglo-American revolutionary, and
professional troublemaker. They certainly don't make 'em like him any
more ... Here's the life story of one of the most colorful characters
of the American Revolution:
Thomas Paine's life was pretty exciting to say the least. He was a central
figure in both the American War of Independence and the French Revolution.
During Paine's event-filled 72 years, he took on the British government
and army, the French king, and anyone else he considered an opponent of
liberty. Though Paine was entirely self-taught, his works - Common
Sense, The Rights of Man, and The Age of Reason,
to name just a few - probably did more to advance the cause of democracy
than those of any other modern writer.
REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE
Born in England in 1737, Tom Paine was poor and badly educated. He grew
into a cranky young man, unable to hold down either a regular job or a
relationship. By his mid-20s, Paine had held and lost a string of positions
and had been married twice.
Thomas Paine's home in Lewes, England. Photo: Kto288 [wikipedia]
Paine's life was at a low ebb when, in his late 30s, he found work as
a customs officer. Customs men were held in low esteem (even the smugglers
they were hired to capture were more popular.) The work paid little and
was thankless - so Paine decided to do something about it. He had a passion
for self-improvement and was constantly reading books on science, politics,
and philosophy. Inspired by his reading, Paine organized his coworkers
into a protest group to agitate for better conditions. He also wrote the
first of his many political tracts, The Case of the Officers of the
Excise. But Paine's attempt at a workers' revolt failed, and he was
fired.
SAVED BY THE BEN
That was when things started to look up. Paine moved to London, and while
there, got to know Benjamin Franklin (both men attended meetings of the
same scientific society.) Franklin recognized Paine as a man of spirit
and energy, and so recommended that Paine head for America, where his
ornery nature would fit right in. Franklin even wrote Paine some letters
of introduction. It was Paine's good luck to arrive in America just when
the colonies' simmering squabbles with the mother country were coming
to the boil. As someone who already had a grudge against His Majesty's
government, Paine wasted no time in joining the fray. In late 1774, he
found a job with the Pennsylvania Magazine and set about writing
article after article denouncing what he saw as the inequality, injustice,
and corruption around him. Aged 37, Thomas Paine had a new lease of life.
LET'S GET RADICAL
Up to the time, the main gripe between the British government and the
American colonists was about why America's settlers should pay taxes to
the British government when they were not allowed any representation in
the British parliament ("no taxation without representation,"
as the saying goes).
But as far as Paine was concerned, Americans shouldn't be negotiating
for representation in the British Parliament - they should be demanding
independence from Britain itself. Thomas Paine's pioneering role in passionately
and powerfully arguing for America's independence should never be underestimated.
On January 10, 1776, Paine published Common Sense, a 50-page
pamphlet that laid out the case for American independence in no uncertain
terms. It was an immediate sensation, with 500,000 copies sold. Common
Sense heavily influenced Thomas Jefferson's writing of the Declaration
of Independence, published on July 4, 1776, just six months later.
KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK
But
after having written the script for the American Revolution, Paine found
that his services were no longer required. He was given a number of minor
political posts by the Continental Congress during the war, but just to
keep him out of the way. Wealthy, politically ambitious Brahmins like
John Jay and John Adams were not prepared to give a loose cannon like
Paine any responsibility.
Instead, Paine was encouraged to continue his verbal assaults on the
hated British. Between 1776 and 1783, Paine reeled off 16 pamphlets designed
to boost the war effort. They were called the Crisis Papers.
The first of these, which begins with the famous line, "These are
the times that try men's souls," so inspired George Washington that
he ordered it read aloud to the troops during their darkest days at Valley
Forge.
THE $64,000 ANSWER
At the end of the war, Paine found himself famous but poor. Although
his pamphlets had sold hundreds of thousands of copies, Paine accepted
no royalties from them, insisting instead that the price of each pamphlet
be kept low enough for ordinary folk to afford.
To alleviate Paine's poverty, his supporters in Congress put forward
a bill offering financial assistance to the hero of the revolution. But
the Brahmins blocked the bill. In the end, the State of Pennsylvania came
to Paine's rescue by offering him a sum of £500 (which would translate
to about $64,000 in today's U.S. currency). The New York State also pitched
in, donating a farm for him in New Rochelle, now a suburb of New York
City.
RIGHTS PLACE, RIGHTS TIME
So, having sort of single-handedly launched the American War of Independence,
Paine turned his attention to Europe. Once again, his timing was perfect:
Paine arrived just after the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789.
When, in 1791, the British politician Edmund Burke wrote Reflections
on the Revolution in France, attacking the uprising, Paine hit back
with The Rights of Man.
PAINE SEES LONDON ...
Paine's book was an immediate sensation, and has since been recognized
as an all-time classic of political writing. It has sold more than 500,000
copies and was the best-selling book of the entire 18th century. The book
didn't just defend the French Revolution, it attacked the monarchy, undemocratic
governments, the rich, the powerful, and pretty much anyone else Paine
saw as responsible for the misery around him - in Britain as much as in
France.
He then laid out his own plans for an alternative government, with policies
including pensions for the poor, free education, and lots of other radical
ideas. The British government was horrified by all this radical theorizing:
Paine was declared a traitor and a warrant was issued for his arrest.
Memorial coins were created with Paine's face on them, so that British
aristocrats could set them into heels of their boots and grind Paine's
face into the dust each time they went for a walk!
PAINE SEES FRANCE ...
But
Paine had already fled. The French, recognizing a kindred spirit, had
elected Paine to a seat in their revolutionary government, the National
Convention.
However, as in America, Paine managed to tick off his revolutionary colleagues.
When the National Convention voted to execute the ousted king, Louis XVI,
Paine was among those who protested.
At this time the revolutionary government was under the control of Maximilien
Robespierre, a hard-line radical prone to chopping off the heads of anyone
who got in his way. Paine was imprisoned in 1793, threatened with execution,
and held captive until Robespierre's fall from power the following year.
On his release, Paine published the Age of Reason, an attack
on organized religion and his last great work.
PAINE GETS KICKED IN THE PANTS
Paine
hung out in France until 1802, just to make sure the revolution was safe.
(It wasn't. By this time, Napoleon had seized power and set up a military
dictatorship). Fed up with the infighting among the French, Paine returned
to America.
But when he got there he wasn't welcome any more. America was no longer
Britain's rebellious younger sibling, but a grown-up power in her own
right. Professional revolutionaries like Paine were unwanted in a country
looking for a period of peace and quiet.
Outgoing president John Adams branded Paine as "that insolent Blasphemer
of things sacred and transcendent, Libeler of all that is good."
If that weren't bad enough, Adams went on to describe Paine as "a
mongrel between pig and puppy, begotten by a wild boar on a bitch wolf."
NOT SUCH AS BAD GUY AFTER ALL
Rejected by the country he helped to create, Paine turned to drink. He
died penniless in 1809 in New York City. His obituary in the New York
Citizen claimed, "He had lived long, did some good and much
harm," which just goes to show how much history had been rewritten
even during Paine's own lifetime. It was only in the mid-20th century
that Paine's rehabilitation began.
A Thomas Paine monument in New Rochelle, New York. Photo: Anthony22 [wikipedia]
On May 18, 1953, a bust of Paine was unveiled in the New York University
Hall of Fame, and since then, his reputation as a fighter for freedom
and justice has been gradually restored, piece by piece.
SOME LAST WORDS
Thomas Paine was a writer of power and passion whose life-long quest
was to make the world a better place. His words - such as these - are
as relevant now as ever:
When it shall be said in any country in the world, my poor are
happy; neither ignorance nor distress is to be found among them; my
jails are empty of prisoners; my streets of beggars; the aged are not
in want; the taxes are not oppressive ... When these things can be said,
then may that country boasts its constitution and its government.
The book is a compendium of entertaining information chock-full of facts on a plethora of history topics. Uncle John's first plunge into history was a smash hit - over half a million copies sold! And this sequel gives you more colorful characters, cultural milestones, historical hindsight, groundbreaking events, and scintillating sagas.
"Eureka!" Archimedes screamed, then he ran outside naked ...
Every high school physics student knows about Fourier’s Law of
Heat Conduction and Hooke’s Law of Elasticity. But not many know
that Joseph Fourier lived inside a wooden box in his old age. Or that Robert Hooke’s
arch-nemesis, Isaac Newton, hated him so much that he had Hooke’s
portrait removed from the Royal Society and tried to have his papers burned.
Imagine how much fun science class would’ve been, had these been
taught along side all those equations and formulas.
Well, now you can read about the interesting stuff that your school textbooks
didn‘t bother to include. In his latest book, Archimedes
to Hawking: Laws of Science and the Great Minds Behind Them,
Cliff Pickover takes some 40 eponymous laws of physics and explains the
life of the scientists whom these laws are named after. The book is far
from a dry listing of scientific formulas - actually, it’s full
of quirky trivia and nifty facts about some of the world’s greatest
scientists.
Cliff has graciously allowed us to take samples from the book for this
article and generously offer personalized copies of the book to 3 lucky
Neatorama readers (see below for details).
So, if you didn’t know that Archimedes sometimes sent his colleagues
false theorems in order to trap them when they stole his ideas, or that
Daniel Bernoulli‘s father threw him out for winning a science competition,
then this Neatorama post is for you. Behold, the 5 Scientific Laws and
the Scientists Behind Them (no complicated math, we promise!)
1. Archimedes’ Principle of Buoyancy
The Law: According to Archimedes’ principle, a
body wholly or partially submerged in liquid is buoyed up by a force equal
to the weight of the displaced liquid. This buoyant force depends on the
density of the liquid and the volume of the object, but not its shape.
The law seems simple, but it is actually not intuitive that objects with
equal volume experience the same buoyant force when held under water:
cubes made of cork and lead would experience the same buoyant force, yet
would have completely different behavior. This is because the different
ratios of buoyant force to object weights.
Archimedes’ Principle of Buoyancy has many applications, including
determining the pressure of a liquid as a function of depth. It helps
us understand how floatation works and is one of the founding principles
of hydrostatics.
The Famous Legend Behind the Law: One day, King Hieron
II of Syracuse, Sicily, wanted to find out whether his wreath-shaped crown
was actually made from pure gold. He called upon Archimedes to find out
(without damaging the crown, say by melting it down). Roman architect
and engineer Marcus Vitruvius wrote:
While Archimedes was turning the problem over, he chanced to come
to the place of bathing, and there, as he was sitting down in the tub,
he noticed that the amount of water which flowed over the tub was equal
to the amount by which his body was immersed. This showed him means
of solving the problem … In his joy, he leapt out of the tub and,
rushing naked toward his home, he cried out with a loud voice that he
had found what he sought.
Archimedes was able to obtain the exact volume of the crown by dunking
it in water and measuring the displaced water. He then took the weight
of the crown and divided it by its volume to get the density of the crown,
which turned out to be between that of gold and silver. Archimedes was
thus able to show that the wreath was not made out of pure gold (and the
royal goldsmith was executed).
Modern scholars suggest that this story was bogus, as it would be unlikely
that Archimedes had measuring equipment with sufficient accuracy to detect
the difference (plus, he hated to bathe - see below).
The
Man Behind the Law: Archimedes of Syracuse (287-212 B.C.), was
a Greek geometer and is often regarded as one of the greatest mathematicians
and scientists who ever lived.
Here are a few things about Archimedes you may not know:
- Plutarch wrote that Archimedes was so obsessed with math that his servants
had to force him to bathe, and that while they scrubbed him, he continued
to draw geometrical figures on his body!
- Archimedes invented a machine called the Archimedean screw to pump
water.
- He also invented a “death ray” weapon using a set of mirrors
that focused sunlight on Roman ships, setting them on fire. After many
scientists discounted the story as false, David Wallace of MIT actually
did the experiment: He had his students build an oak replica of a Roman
ship and focused sunlight on it using 127 mirrored tiles from a distance
of 30 meters. After ten minutes of exposure, the ship burst into flames!
- When the Romans captured Syracuse in 212 B.C., a Roman soldier came
upon the mathematician who was studying a mathematical diagram drawn in
the sand. Archimedes was annoyed by the soldier’s interruption,
and said “Don’t disturb my circles” before he was killed.
Moral of the story: don’t piss off a Roman soldier!
2. Hooke’s Law of Elasticity
The Law: Hooke’s Law of Elasticity states that
if an object, such a spring, is elongated by some distance x, then the
restoring force F exerted by the object is proportional to x:
The k is a constant called the spring constant if the object is a spring.
The
Man Behind the Law: Robert Hooke (1635 - 1702) was an English
physicist and polymath. As you can see, Hooke was an ugly man (he was
severely disfigured by smallpox). (Photo: Molecular
Expressions: Science, Optics and You)
Here are a few things about Hooke you may not know:
- Robert Hooke was a sickly child and wasn’t expected to reach
adulthood, so his parents didn’t bother educating him. Left to his
own devices, Hooke made mechanical models and clocks.
- He was the first to coin the word “cell” to describe the
basic unit of life (he thought that plant cells, when magnified through
a microscope, looked like “cellula,” the living quarters of
monks).
- Hooke was a busy man: he was the Surveyor to the City of London, helped
rebuild the city after the Great Fire in 1666, and even designed the infamous
Bethlem Royal Hospital (“Bedlam”) and the Royal College of
Physicians.
- In 1672, Hooke criticized Isaac Newton who used a prism to split white
light into its various components. Furious at Hooke, Newton had his portraits
removed from the Royal Society and even attempted to burn his papers.
Hooke mentioned to Newton about a possible inverse-square principle of
gravitation, but Newton didn’t credit Hooke when he published Principia
Mathematica, saying "Merely because one says something might
be so, it does not follow that it has been proved that it is."
- Hooke was interested in the science of respiration, so he had himself
placed in a sealed vessel from which air was gradually pumped out. As
you can imagine, the experiment was detrimental to Hooke’s health:
he damaged his ears and experienced deafness in the process.
- In 2006, the Royal Society purchased a manuscript by Hooke for $1.75
million, in which he wrote 500 pages of notes recorded during Royal Society
meetings. In the notes, Hooke castigated Newton and Robert Boyle for stealing
his ideas. He also wrote that Dutch microscopist Anton van Leeuwenhoek
found "a vast number of small animals in his Excrements which
were most abounding when he was troubled with a Looseness and very few
or none when he was well."
3. Bernoulli's Law of Fluid Dynamics (Bernoulli's Principle)
The Law: Imagine fluid flowing steadily through a pipe
that carries it from the top to the bottom of a hillside. The pressure
of the liquid changes along the pipe, and Daniel Bernoulli discovered
the law that relates the pressure, flow speed, and height for a fluid
flowing in a pipe. Today, this law is written as:
You may not be aware of Bernoulli's Law, but it has numerous applications
in real life: Bernoulli's Law is used when designing the Venturi throat,
a constricted region in the air passage of a car motor's carburetor that
causes a reduction in pressure, and in turn causes fuel vapor to be drawn
out of the carburetor bowl.
The design of airplane wings take advantage of the knowledge we gleaned
from Bernoulli's Law: these wings are designed to create an area of fast
flowing air on its upper surface, which cause pressure near this area
to drop and thus pull the wing upward.
Finally, we've all experienced Bernoulli's Law in action: the shower
curtain is pulled inward when water first comes out of the shower because
the increase in water and air velocity inside the shower causes pressure
to drop. The pressure difference between the outside and inside of the
curtain causes it to be sucked inward.
The
Man Behind the Law: Daniel Bernoulli (1700-1782) was polymath
that came from a family of extraordinary Swiss mathematicians. In fact,
his father, Johann Bernoulli, and his uncle, Jacob, were famous mathematicians.
Interestingly, both Daniel and his father Johann secretly studied mathematics
against the wishes of their respective fathers. Just as Johann's father
tried to force him into becoming a merchant, Johann did the same to Daniel.
Indeed, Johann had his son's future all mapped out, including whom to
marry!
Finally, Daniel told his father that he'd had enough, and both of them
came to a truce: Daniel would become a doctor and Johann would personally
teach him math.
Here are a few things about Daniel Bernoulli you may not know:
- Johann had always been jealous of Daniel's success. In 1735, after
both the father and son tied for first place in a science competition
held by the Paris Academy of Sciences, Johann was unable to bear the “shame"
of being comparable to his son and threw Daniel out of his house for winning
the prize that he felt should've been his alone!
- Daniel published his work on fluid physics in a book titled Hydrodynamica
(where we get the word "hydrodynamics" from) in 1734. Johann
became jealous of Daniel's work and published his own plagiarized version,
Hydraulica … and predated it to 1732 to make it seem that
his work appeared before his son's!
- Daniel was a prolific author and wrote on whatever subjects struck
his fancy. One of his papers discussed the formula for computing the relationship
between the number of oarsmen on a ship and the ship's velocity. In another
paper, Daniel wrote what would become the basis of the economic theory
of risk aversion and overall happiness gained from goods or services.
4. Dalton's Law of Partial Pressures
The Law: Dalton's Law of Partial Pressures states that
the total pressure Pt exerted by a mixture of gases in a container
is equal to the sum of the separate pressures that each gases would exert
if just that single gas occupied the entire volume of the container.
That may seem trivial, but it's actually one of the more useful gas laws
for scientists.
The
Man Behind the Law: John Dalton (1766 - 1844) grew in a poor
family, was a poor speaker, severely color-blind, and was even considered
a crude or simple experimentalist. Yet, he achieved significant professional
successes and made great contributions to chemistry, meteorology, and
physics.
In the early 19th century, Dalton developed the atomic theory, in which
he proposed that each chemical element is composed of atoms of single,
unique type and that though these atoms are indestructible, they can combine
in simple ratios. For this, many consider Dalton to be the "Father
of Chemistry".
Here are a few things about John Dalton you may not know:
- Legend has it that Dalton once bought his mother special stockings
for her birthday. The mother, a Quaker woman, was shocked that he would
buy her scarlet stockings. Dalton thought that they were blue, and asked
his brother … who also saw them as blue! At that point, he realized
that both he and his brother were color blind.
- Dalton did the first systematic study of color blindness and wrote
the very first paper on the subject. In his honor, color blindness is
sometimes called Daltonism.
- Since he was 21, Dalton kept a detailed diary of the weather, and continued
to update it until the very day of his death. Dalton was so obsessed with
records that he kept meticulous records of hits, misses, and other scores
when he played the English game of lawn bowling!
- Dalton never married, saying "My head is too full of triangles,
chymical process, and electrical experiments, etc., to think much of marriage."
- After his death, and according to his wishes, one of Dalton's eyes
was cut open to determine the cause of his color blindness (Dalton had
always thought that it was due to colored fluid inside his eyes - but
that turned out not to be the case.) In the 1990s, cellular analysis revealed
that the eye lacked the pigment that provides sensitivity to green.
5. Fourier's Law of Heat Conduction
The Law: Fourier's Law of Heat Conduction deals with
the transmission of heat in materials. The law states that the heat flux,
Q (the flow of heat per unit area and per unit of time), is proportional
to the gradient of the temperature difference.
Fourier's Law is used in many diverse areas of science, and it explains
why diamonds are cool to the touch (they have high thermal conductivity).
The
Man Behind the Law: Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier (1768 - 1830)
was a French mathematicians and Egyptologist.
Here are a few things about Fourier you may not know:
- When he was only 16, Fourier discovered a new proof of Descartes’
rule
of signs. His teenage achievement quickly became standard proof. By
the age of 21, however, Fourier was in doubt whether he could ever make
a significant contribution to mathematics. He wrote to his professor "Yesterday
was my 21st birthday, at that age Newton and Pascal had already acquired
many claims to immortality." It’s a good thing Fourier
carried on!
- Instead of a career in science, young Fourier seriously considered
being a priest. Indeed, he arrived at the Benedictine abbey of St. Benoit-sur-Leoire
to prepare for his vows, but left when he realized that he only had one
true love: mathematics.
- During the French Revolution, Fourier tried to defend scientists like
Antoine Lavoisier, the founder of modern chemistry. Appeals to spare Lavoisier’s
life was cut short when the judge said “The Republic has no need
for geniuses” and he was guillotined. Afterwards, Fourier was thrown
in prison but managed to escape death when the political climate changed.
- In his work on heat propagation in thin sheets of material, Fourier
invented a very useful mathematical tool that would later become known
as the Fourier Series. Here, Fourier showed that any periodic function
can be represented by a sum of simple sine and cosine oscillating functions.
- Fourier accompanied Napoleon to Egypt. When he returned, Fourier had
a strange medical condition: he was always cold and had to wear several
overcoats, even in the heat of summer. It’s ironic to think that
though he was an expert in heat transfer, Fourier was not good at regulating
his own body heat!
- Global warming? Blame Fourier - he came up with the idea that the atmosphere
acts as a “translucent dome,” which like a lid of a pot, absorbs
some of the heat of the Sun and reradiates it downward to Earth.
- During his last months, Fourier’s body was so frail that he would
live inside a wooden box with holes cut out for his head and arms. This
“living coffin” would keep his body upright and let him work
on his correspondence!
The
article above is but a small selection of the amazing trivia and fascinating
stories about some of the greatest names in science. If you love science,
or would like to instill the love of science to your children, pick up
Cliff Pickover's Archimedes to Hawking: Laws of Science and the Great
Minds Behind Them. You won't be disappointed
On a personal note, this article took way longer than I thought (and
I didn't even get to Stephen Hawking!) ... because I ended up reading
Cliff's book from cover to cover! It was definitely an interesting read.
Now, like I mentioned above, Cliff has generously offered free
copies of Archimedes to Hawking to Neatorama readers
with the most interesting experience with science or funny personal story
about a science class ... Write yours in the comment section; the best
three will win a free personalized copy of Cliff's book (so make it good!)
The history of computing spans thousands of years – from the primitive notched bones found in Africa, to the invention of abacus in 2400 BC, to Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine in 1883, to the rise of the popularity of Personal Computers (PCs) in the 1970s. For the most part, this timeline is marked by devices that bear little or no resemblance to present-day machines both in form and capabilities.
We’ve had many posts on Neatorama about the newest and greatest in computers and technology. But for this article, let’s go back – way back – and take a look at the wonderful world of early computing.
Lebombo and Ishango Bones
The Lebombo bone is a 35,000-year-old baboon fibula discovered in a cave in the Lebombo mountains in Swaziland. The bone has a series of 29 notches that were deliberately cut to help ancient bushmen calculate numbers and perhaps also measure the passage of time. It is considered the oldest known mathematical artifact.
The unusual groupings of the notches on the Ishango bone (see above), discovered in what was then the Belgian Congo, suggested that it was some sort of a stone age calculation tool. The 20,000-year-old bone revealed that early civilization had mastered arithmetic series and even the concept of prime numbers.
Abacus
Today, abacus is mostly synonymous with the Chinese suanpan version, but in actuality it had been used in Babylon as early as 2400 BC. The abacus was also found in ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome. Even the Aztecs had their own version.
The Roman pocket abacus was the first portable calculating device, presumably invented to help tax collectors do math while on the go!
Antikythera Mechanism
In 1900, a Greek sponge diver spotted a shipwreck off the coast of the tiny island of Antikythera. Little did he know that amongst the jewelry and statues recovered from the wreck, the most precious item would be a lump of green rock with gears sticking out of it.
The "rock" turned out to be the earliest example of analog computer: an intricate mechanism with more than 30 gears and writings that scientists thought was used to calculate the motion of the sun and the moon against a background of fixed stars.
The Antikythera Mechanism, as the device was named, was dated from around 100 BC. It would take about another 1,000 years for the appearance of similar levels of technical sophistication in the West. Who built the machine and why the technology was lost remained a mystery.
Napier’s Bones
In 1614, Scottish mathematician John Napier proposed a radical idea called logarithm that made calculations by hand much easier and quicker. (That wasn’t his only contribution to math: Napier was a big proponent of the decimal point, which wasn’t much in use until he came around.)
He also created a device, called Napier’s bones, that let people perform multiplications by doing a series of additions (which was a lot easier to do) and divisions as a series of subtraction. It could even do square and cube roots! This invention may seem trivial to you and me, but it
was a significant advancement in computing at the time.
Wilhelm Schickard’s Calculating Clock
In 1623, Wilhelm Schickard of the University of Tübingen, Württemberg (now part of Germany), invented the first mechanical calculator. Schickard’s contemporaries called the machine the Speeding Clock or the Calculating Clock.
Schickard’s calculator, which was built 20 years before Blaise Pascal and Gottfried Leibniz’s machines, could add and subtract six-digit numbers (with a bell as an overflow alarm!). This invention was used by his friend, astronomer Johannes Kepler, to calculate astronomical tables, which was a big leap for astronomy at the time. For this, Wilhelm Schickard was considered by some to be the "Father of Computer Age."
Wilhelm Schickard died of the Bubonic Plague in 1635, thirteen years after inventing the world’s first mechanical calculator. The prototype and plans for the calculator was lost to history until the 20th century, when the machine’s design was discovered among Kepler’s papers.
The second mechanical calculator, called the Pascaline or the Arithmetique, was invented in 1645 by Blaise Pascal. Pascal started working on his calculator when he was just 19 years old, out of boredom. He created a device to help his father, a tax collector, to crunch numbers.
In 1649, Pascal received a Royal Privilege giving him the exclusive right to make and sell calculating machines in France. However, because of the complexity of his machine and its limitation (the Pascaline could only add and subtract, and frequently jammed), he managed to sell just a little over a dozen.
The basic mechanism of the Pascaline is a series of gears – when the first gear with ten teeth made one rotation (one to ten), it shifts a second gear until it rotated ten times (one hundred). The second gear shifted a third one (thousands) and so on. This mechanism is still in use today in car odometers, electricity meters and at the gas pumps.
Leibniz’ Stepped Reckoner
Eleven years after Pascal’s death, German mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was inspired by a steps-counting machine (pedometer) he saw to build his own calculator.
Leibniz’s design used a special type of gear called the Stepped Drum or Leibniz wheel, a cylinder with nine bar-shaped teeth along its length. He named his machine the Staffelwalze or the Stepped Reckoner.
The machine was a marked improvement from Pascal’s design and could add, subtract, multiply, divide, and even evaluate square roots by a series of additions. (Photo: calculmecanique)
Despite his genius, Leibniz was so out of favor (he picked a fight with Sir Isaac Newton on who invented calculus) that when he died, his grave went unmarked for 50 years!
The Jacquard Loom
In 1801, straw hat maker and inventor Joseph Marie Jacquard created a punch-card controlled loom that enabled one person to produce fabric in a fraction of the time it would take a traditional silk weaver to make.
The pattern of holes in the card determined which weaving rods could pass through. This, in turn, made the pattern on the fabric.
When he unveiled his invention at an industrial exposition in Paris, traditional silk weavers took to the street to protest the threat to their livelihood.
Since the invention of Schickard’s calculator, it took nearly 200 years for calculators to become commercially successful.
In 1820, Charles Xavier Thomas de Colmar, a French mathematician, created the first commercially successful mechanical calculator. The machine, which used stepped cylinder invented by Leibniz, was called the Arithmometer. It could add, subtract, multiply (and with some user intervention, divide) and was the calculator of choice for nearly a hundred years. (Photo: Popular-science Museum, The Hague, Netherlands)
Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine
In the early 1800s, numerical tables, such as for polynomial functions, were routinely calculated by humans. They were actually called "computers" (meaning "one that computes"). Understandably, this process was filled with human errors.
In 1822, an eccentric British mathematician and inventor named Charles Babbage proposed a machine called the Difference Engine to calculate a series of mathematical values automatically.
Babbage started to build his first engine, which was composed of around 25,000 parts, weighed 15 tons (13,600 kg) and stood 8 feet (2.4 m) high. It was never completed, and Babbage left to pursue another idea, a more complex Analytical Engine, which could be programmed using punch cards – an idea far beyond his time.
Part of Babbage’s first Difference Engine, assembled by his son after his death using parts found in his workshop. (Photo: Andrew Dunn [wikipedia])
Babbage’s Difference Engine was considered one of the first mechanical computers. Despite of its unwieldy design, his plan called for a basic architecture very similar to that of a modern computer.
Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine No. 2, with Doron Swade of The Science Museum who oversaw its construction. (Photo: Science Museum/Science & Society Picture Library)
In 1985, The Science Museum in London started a project to build an actual Difference Engine (actually an updated version that Babbage designed in 1849) and a printer (also designed by the guy). The calculation section of the Engine alone consisted of 4,000 parts (this more sophisticated design called for a third of the parts required for the first version of the Engine) and weighed 2,600 kg (5,700 lb). It was completed and working in November 1991. Impressively, the machine was accurate to 31 decimal places!
Interesting fact: one of the reasons that Babbage never completed his Difference Engine was that he couldn’t help but to continuously tinker with and improve the design (he came up with the idea for the Analytical Engine even before he could build the Difference Engine). This was probably the first recorded instance of feature creep.
George Boole Invented Boolean Algebra
In 1847, self-taught British mathematician George Boole invented a branch of algebra that dealt with logic. In Boole’s system, logic operations can be boiled down to three steps: union (OR), intersection (AND), and complementation (NOT). Boole’s idea was brilliant – but at the time, it was criticized and completely ignored by his contemporaries.
It was not until almost 100 years later that in 1938, engineer Claude Shannon realized that Boolean algebra could be applied to two-valued electrical switching circuits. Shannon’s work, and by extension, that of George Boole, became the foundation of modern day digital circuit design and was the basis for all digital electronics.
Konrad Zuse’s Z3 Computer
In 1941, despite financial hardship and isolation from computer scientists from other Western countries, German computer pioneer Konrad Zuse created the world’s first programmable computer, the Z3, from spare telephone parts.
The Z3 uses 2,000 relays (an electric switch) and was used to design aircrafts. Zuse’s request to create an electronic successor for the machine was denied by Germany as "strategically unimportant." The original Z3 was destroyed in air raid of Berlin, so Zuse built a fully-functioning replica later in the 1960s.
Neat facts: Zuse also created the world’s first high-level programming language, called Plankalkül, and founded the first computer startup company in 1946.
Bombe and Colossus: Cracking Nazi Codes During World War II
During World War II, Nazi Germany used an electro-mechanical cipher machine called Enigma to encrypt and decrypt coded messages. It used rotors to substitute letters (for example, an "E" might be coded as "T"). The genius of the Enigma was that the machine used polyalphabetic cipher, where the rotation of the rotors allowed each subsequent letters to be encoded in a different manner. (For example, "EEE" might be become "TIF").
Obviously, the Allies were very interested in breaking the Nazi codes. Before the war, Polish cryptographer Marian Rejewski had devised a machine called the Bomba kryptologiczna (or simply "Bomba" or "bomb") to break Enigma. The machine was clunky and cumbersome, not to mention loud like a bomb (hence the name), but it worked!
In 1939, Britain intelligence set up the Government Code and Cypher School under the codename "ULTRA" at Bletchley Park (then known as Station X), 50 miles north of London. Bletchley Park workers included a motley group of mathematicians, computer scientists, and even crossword experts and chess champions. Amongst them was Alan Turing, who later became known as the father of modern computer science.
To break enigma codes, Turing, along with mathematician Gordon Welchman, devised the "Bombe," an electromechanical machine based on Rejewski’s earlier design. The Bombe allowed the Allies to routinely decode the bulk of enemy’s encrypted communication.
Although Enigma was used by the field units, Nazi high command used a more secure system called the Lorenz SZ 40/42 cipher machines. The Allies nicknamed these machines "Fish" and their cipher traffic as "Tunny."
A team headed by Tommy Flowers designed and built a special-purpose vacuum tube-based computer called Colossus to decrypt Tunny traffic. An operator would feed cipher text on a 5-bit paper tape, which the machine would read at an impressively fast (imagine a paper tape speeding along) 5,000 characters per second. A total of 11 Collosi were built for the war effort.
Colossus Mark II (Photo: Public Record Office, London)
After the war, Churchill ordered Bletchley Park to be closed and all of the Colossus computers destroyed into "pieces no bigger than a man’s hand" and its blueprints burned. Indeed, the project was so secret that the contributions of Flowers and his colleagues weren’t recognized for many years after the war.
In 1994, a team led by computer scientist Tony Sale (L) began rebuilding the Colossus. (Photo: MaltaGC [wikipedia])
Harvard Mark I
When he was working on his doctoral thesis in physics, Howard H. Aiken ran into a problem – he needed numbers for his theory of space-charge conduction in vacuum tubes, but the problem was too complex for calculators of the day. The solution was obvious: build a bigger calculator!
In 1943, Aiken and IBM created what is now considered the first universal calculator: a 51 ft (16 m) long, 8 ft (2.4 m) tall and 2 feet (0.6 m) deep machine weighing about 10,000 pounds (4,500 kg) called the Harvard Mark I. At the time, the machine was unbelievably fast: it could do 3 calculations per second!
Harvard Mark I was built out of relays, switches, clutches, and rotating shafts. It has over 765,000 parts, 3,300 relays, 175,000 connections and over 500 miles (800 km) of wire. A physicist named Jeremy Bernstein once visited Aiken’s work and remarked that the machine made noise "like a roomful of ladies knitting."
The ENIAC in the Army’s Ballistic Research Laboratory. (L: Glen Beck, R: Frances Holberton) Credit: K. Kempf "Historical Monograph: Electronic Computers Within the Ordnance Corps," U.S. Army Photo.
The birth of the world’s first electronic digital computer was ushered … by war. In 1943, on the eve of World War II, the US military realized
that they needed help calculating artillery firing tables, a compilation of ballistic weapon settings. So, they contacted John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert at the University of Pennsylvania to develop ENIAC (Electrical Numerical Integrator and Calculator, nicknamed "Eny").
Completed in 1946, ENIAC was a behemoth of a computer: it measured 8.5 feet by 3 feet by 80 feet (2.6 m x 0.9 m x 26 m), covered an area of 680 sq. feet (167 m2) and weighed 27 tons. The complex machine contained 17,468 vacuum tubes, 7,200 crystal diodes, 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors, 1,500 relays, 6,000 manual switches, and over 5 million hand-soldered joints. The machine was so power-hungry – it required 150 kilowatts of electricity – that it was rumored that when ENIAC was turned on, Philadelphia suffered brownouts! (Well, not really, but it made for a good story.)
When they were building the machine, Mauchly and Eckert knew that mice would be a problem, so they put samples of all the wires that were available at the time inside a cage with a bunch of mice to see which wire insulation the critters didn’t like! They only used wires that passed the "mouse test."
Two women operating the ENIAC’s main control panel (L: Betty Jennings, R: Frances Bilas) Credit: U.S. Army Photo.
At the time, the ENIAC was definitely fast: it could calculate 5,000 additions, 357 multiplications or 38 divisions in one second – a thousand time faster than any other calculating machines of the time.
World War II ended before the ENIAC was completed. Nevertheless, the military continued to support the project (the first ENIAC calculations were for a hydrogen bomb project).
The invention of ENIAC was a watershed moment in computing history. It was the computer that proved electronic digital computing was possible. Indeed, many computer scientists regard that there are two epochs in computer history: Before ENIAC and After ENIAC. We owe the birth of the first modern electronic computer to war spending!
Note: Though Colossus was constructed before ENIAC, it wasn’t "Turing complete" (Colossus has a specialized function and couldn’t be used for general calculations like ENIAC). Also, the existence of Colossus was kept secret until the 1970s, well after the birth of ENIAC. The Zuse Z3, on the other hand, was Turing complete but it wasn’t electronic.
In an ensuing legal battle to break ENIAC’s patent, another machine called
the Atanasoff-Berry Computer (or ABC) was deemed by the courts as the first computer. Most computer scientists, however, didn’t consider this legal decision as scientifically correct: ABC wasn’t programmable and wasn’t Turing complete, so they still considered ENIAC to be the first true computer.
World’s First Computer "Bug"
On September 9, 1945, U.S. Navy officer Grace Hopper found the first computer "bug": a moth stuck between the relays on the Harvard Mark II (successor to the Mark I above) She noted it on her log as the "first actual case of bug being found." Though the term "bug" had meant a computer error beforehand, it became a popular term after this incident.
Hopper went on to create the first compiler for a computer programming language (the A-0 System for the UNIVAC in 1952) and worked on the development of COBOL, one of the earliest high-level programming languages that allowed programmers to use words instead of machine codes. To acknowledge her contributions, the U.S. Navy named a ship after her (it’s a guided missile destroyer, by the way).
Even if you’ve never heard of Grace Hopper before reading this article, chances are you’ve heard one of her famous quotes: "It’s easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission."
I’ll be the first to admit that this post – long as it is – doesn’t give a complete picture of the development of early computers. We haven’t talked about the contributions of Nikola Tesla (he invented the electromechanical AND gate), Vannevar Bush (who brought analog computing to new heights with his differential analyzer and who pioneered the concept of memex, a theoretical idea similar to the World Wide Web) the invention of vacuum tubes, and so on.
After ENIAC, there was an explosive growth in computer science. In 1947, three Bell Lab engineers – William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain, sparked a revolution in computing by inventing the transistor. Computers went commercial as mainframes, and later, became "personal" as they become smaller and faster.
One thing is for sure: we’re living in the golden age of computer. Computing power continually becomes faster and faster, and we’re finding new ways to use computers in our daily lives.
Amongst the myriad of weird houses from around the world, here’s a true gem: the Broken Column House created by aristocrat François Nicolas Henri Racine de Monville before the French Revolution.
Yes – the house was designed to look like an abandoned ruin, complete with fake cracks on the walls!
Unfortunately, the house and surrounding garden were actually abandoned (for real). A restoration program was initiated in the 1980s and continue until today, which brings up an interesting question:
How does one return an artificial ruin, which became a true ruin, back to its original artificiality, a condition which aspired to be what it had become?
How does one restore decay from a state of real decay?
Here one imagines the restorers waking up in the middle of the night, screaming and drenched with sweat, unwilling to return to sleep for fear of dreaming recursively the horrors of authenticity. “Is this a fake crack? A real crack? Fake? Real? Fake? Real?"
A look at the future, as predicted in the past. Or maybe, a look at what the present would have been like if the predictions of the past came to pass. Anyway way you look at it, the future ain’t what it used to be!
Assuming that we dodged the 1984, Brave New World bullet, our future was supposed to be a sort of technocratic, atomic-powered, computer-controlled, antiseptic, space-travelling Jerusalem that would at last free us from the curse of Eden and original sin. We expected some how, some way that we would be on the road to being freed from the human condition. We expected a sort of bloodless, benign French Revolution with Hugo Gernsback as our Voltaire and Carl Sagan as our Robespierre. And what did we get? The City of Man with Tivo. The fact is, science fiction and popular science had set the bar so high that only the Second Coming with ray guns would have satisfied.
Eiffel Tower at dusk (Image Credit: franz88 [Flickr])
It’s hard to believe now, but when the Eiffel Tower was proposed in the late 1800s, a lot of Parisians – and French citizens in general – opposed it. Here’s a look at the story behind one of the most recognizable architectural structures on earth.
REVOLUTIONARY THINKING
In 1885, French officials began planning the Great Exposition of 1889, a celebration of the 100th anniversary of the French Revolution. They wanted to build some kind of monument that would be as glorious as France itself.
The Washington Monument, a masonry and marble obelisk, had recently been completed. At 557 feet high, it was the tallest building on earth. The French decided to top it by constructing a 1,000-foot-tall tower right in the heart of Paris.
Now all they had to do was find somebody who could design and build it.
OPEN SEASON
On May 2, 1886, the French government announced a design contest: French engineers and architects were invited to "study the possibility of erecting on the Champ de Mars an iron tower with a base of 125 meters square and 300 meters high."
Whatever the contestants decided to propose, their designs had to meet two other criteria: 1) the structure had to be self-financing- it had to attract enough ticket-buying visitors to the exposition to pay for its own construction; and 2) it had to be a temporary structure that could be torn down easily at the end of the Exposition.
MERCI…BUT NON, MERCI
More than 100 proposals were submitted by the May 18 deadline. Most were fairly conventional, but some were downright weird. One person proposed building a huge guillotine; another suggested erecting a 1,000-foot-tall sprinkler to water all of Paris during droughts; a third suggested putting a huge electric light atop the tower that – with the help of strategically placed parabolic mirrors – would provide the entire city "eight times as much light as is necessary to read a newspaper."
NO CONTEST
The truth was, none of them had a chance. By the time the contest was announced, Alexandre-Gustave Eiffel [wiki] – a 53-year-old structural engineer already considered France’s "master builder in metal" had the job sewn up. (He would later become as le Magicien du Fer – "the Iron Magician.")
Weeks earlier, he had met with French minister Edouard Lockroy and presented plans for a wrought iron tower he was ready to build. Eiffel had already commissioned 5,329 mechanical drawings representing the 18,038 different components that would be used. Lockroy was so impressed that he rigged the contest so only Eiffel’s design would win.
In January 1887, Eiffel signed a contract with the French government and the City of Paris. Eiffel & Company, his engineering firm, agreed to contribute 1.3 million of the tower’s estimated $1.6 million construction cost. In exchange, Eiffel would receive all revenues generated by the tower during the exposition…and for 20 years afterward. (The government agreed to leave the tower up after the Exposition.) Afterward, full ownership reverted to the City of Paris. They could tear it down if they wanted.
MONEY MACHINE
Unlike other public monuments, the Eiffel Tower was designed to make money from the very beginning. If you wanted to take the elevator or the stairs to the first story, you had to pay 2 francs; going all the way to the top cost 5 francs (Sundays were cheaper). That was just the beginning; restaurants, cafes, and shops were planned for the first story; a post office, telegraph office, bakery, and printing press were planned for the second story. In all, the tower was designed to accommodate up to 10,416 paying customers at a time.
GROUNDBREAKING
Construction began on January 26, with not a moment to spare. With barely two years left to build the tower in time for opening of the Exposition, Eiffel would have to build the tower more quickly than any similar structure had been built before. The Washington Monument, just over half the Eiffel Tower’s size, had taken 36 years to complete.
PARISIAN PARTY POOPERS
A 1,000-foot tower would dwarf the Parisian skyline and overpower the city’s other landmarks, including Notre Dame, the Louvre, and Arc de Triomphe. When digging started on the foundation, more than 300 prominent Parisians signed a petition protesting the tower. They claimed that Eiffel’s "hallow candlestick" would "disfigure and dishonor" the city. But Eiffel and the city ignored the petition, and work continued uninterrupted.
The tower still had its critics. A French mathematics professor predicted that when the structure passed the 748-foot mark, it would inevitable collapse; another "expert" predicted that the tower’s lightening rods would kill all the fish in the Seine.
The Paris edition of the New York Herald claimed the tower was changing the weather; and the daily newspaper Le Matin ran a headline story claiming "The Tower is Sinking." If it has really begun to sink," Le Matin pontificated, "any further building should stop and sections already built should be demolished as quickly as possible." As the tower’s progress continued unabated, however, a sense of awe began to replace the fear.
EIGHT WONDER OF THE WORLD
Most advances in architecture and engineering are incremental. If, for instance, you wanted to build the world’s first 10-story building, you’d expect to study the construction techniques of 8-and 9-story buildings first.
But Gustave Eiffel didn’t have that luxury. No one had ever built an iron tower like his of any size…let alone one that was twice as tall as the tallest building on earth.
AN ENGINEERING GENIUS
To accomplish his task, Eiffel devised some incredibly ingenious techniques:
• Unlike other massive engineering projects of the day, he had nearly all of the parts used in the tower prefabricated off-site in his workshops. This meant that when they arrived at the tower, the parts could quickly be riveted into place with a minimum of fuss.
• The rivet holes themselves were predrilled to a tolerance of one-tenth of one millimeter, making it possible for the twenty riveting teams to drive an average of 1,650 rivets a day.
• None of the girders used in the tower was permitted to weigh more than three tons. This made it possible to use smaller cranes to lift everything into place. As Joseph Harris writes in The Tallest Tower:
Eiffel had learned that using small components was faster and safer, even if his method did require more riveting, for cranes could be smaller and more mobile. The chances of accidents were reduced, and if one did occur the consequences were less serious. Use of bigger girders would have slowed the entire operation and required more expensive and complicated construction methods.
Thanks to these and other safety measures, the Eiffel Tower – the world’s tallest construction site – was also one of the safest. Of the hundreds of people who worked on the tower, only one, a riveter’s assistant named Dussardin, fell to his death.
THE PIERS
In the early days of the project, there were actually four construction sites at the Eiffel Tower, one for each foot, or "pier." These piers did not join together until the 180-foot level…and once this point was reached, they had to be set perfectly level with one another to create a perfectly horizontal platform on which the remaining 800 feet of the tower could be built. If the piers were even slightly out of alignment, the tiniest discrepancy at the base of the tower would be magnified at the top: it would appear to lean.
Eiffel knew there was no way he could guarantee the piers would be vertical when finished – the margin for error was too great. So he installed temporary hydraulic pistons in the base of each of the feet. That way, as work on the tower progressed, he could "fine-tune" the entire tower into perfect alignment by slightly raising or lowering each foot. When the tower was properly aligned, workers could drive iron wedges into the piers to secure them permanently.
As it turned out, Eiffel had little to worry about. Even at the 180-foot level, the worst of the four massive piers was less than 2 ½ inches out of alignment. All four were easily adjusted and secured in place. Even today, the tower is perfectly vertical.
FINIS
The Eiffel Tower was a marvel- not just for its ingenuity of design, but also because it was completed ahead of schedule and under budget. The Exposition was scheduled to open on May 6; work on the tower was finished on March 31.
Eiffel & Company earned back it money in record time. During the six months of Exposition alone, the tower earned back more than $1.4 million of its $1.6 million construction cost; that combined with the $300,000 subsidy provided by the French government, pushed the tower into the black even before the Exposition closed.
The tower was such a magnificent structure that it won over many earlier critics. Among them was French prime minister Tirard. He had opposed the project at its inception, but awarded Eiffel the medal of the Legion of Honor after it was finished. The tower, a symbol of France’s unrivaled technical expertise, became the symbol of France itself.
Not everyone who hated the tower experienced a change of heart. Guy de Maupassant, the novelist best known for The Necklace, was said to eat regularly at a restaurant on the tower’s second floor. His reason: It was the only place in Paris where he was sure he wouldn’t see the tower. (Even some of the characters in his novels hated the tower.)
TOWER FACTS
• Every seven years, the Eiffel Tower receives a fresh coat of more than 300 tons of reddish-green paint. Why reddish-green? Because, tower officials say, it is the color that clashed least with the blue sky over Paris, and the green landscape of the Champ de Mars below.
• The positions of the Eiffel Tower’s four "feet" correspond to the "cardinal" points of a compass: they point exactly north, south, west, and east.
• In 1925 the City of Paris wanted to decorate the tower with electric lights as part of an arts exposition being held nearby, but the cost, estimated at $500,000, was too high. When automaker André Citroën learned of the project, he offered to pay for it himself…in exchange for the right to put his company name and corporate symbol in lights as well. The City agreed. "The Eiffel Tower," Blake Ehrlich write in Paris on the Seine, "became the world’s largest electric sign, its outlines traced in lights." The lights were so popular that the tower remained lit with various designs until 1937.
• Sad fact: The Eiffel Tower is the most popular landmark for suicides in France. In an average year, four people commit suicide by jumping off the tower or, occasionally, by hanging themselves from its wrought iron beams. The first person killed in a jump from the tower, in 1911, was not an intentional suicide – the man was a tailor named Reichelt who had sewn himself a "spring-loaded bat-wing cape" that he thought would enable him to fly. It didn’t.
Interesting Sidelight
Gustave Eiffel also designed and built the iron skeleton that holds up the Statute of Liberty.
Room with a view: Among the amenities that Gustave Eiffel designed for the tower was a penthouse apartment at the top, complete with grand piano and spotlights for shining on other Paris monuments. He built it for his own use.
The article above is reprinted with permission from Uncle John’s Giant 10th Anniversary Bathroom Reader, which comes packed with 504 pages of great stories.
Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts.
Jesus Christ didn’t need fancy churches, but thank goodness that some people didn’t listen too well and built magnificent buildings to glorify God. Today, there are thousands of churches: some small and simple, whereas others are humongous and ornately decorated.
Let’s take a look at some divinely designed churches around the world, both classic and modern in style:
Las Lajas Cathedral
Las Lajas Cathedral (Image Credit: Jungle_Boy [Flickr])
Las Lajas Cathedral, side view from the bottom (Image Credit: julkastro [Flickr])
The Sanctuary of Our Lady of Las Lajas, or the Las Lajas Cathedral [wiki] in Colombia, was built in 1916 on a site where, according to local legend, the Virgin Mary appeared. The story goes like this: an Indian woman named María Mueses de Quiñones was carrying her deaf-mute daughter Rosa on her back near Las Lajas ("The Rocks"). Weary of the climb, the María sat down on a rock when Rosa spoke (for the first time) about an apparition in a cave.
Later on, a mysterious painting of the Virgin Mary carrying a baby was discovered on the wall of the cave. Supposedly, studies of the painting showed no proof of paint or pigments on the rock – instead, when a core sample was taken, it was found that the colors were impregnated in the rock itself to a depth of several feet.
Whether true or not, the legend spurred the building of a gothic church worthy of a fairy tale.
Sagrada Familia
La Sagrada Familia, always under construction (Image Credit: chrisjfry [Flickr])
A fantastic photo detailing the exterior of the La Sagrada Familia church by Christopher Chan [Flickr]
La Sagrada at night (Image Credit: martinhughes81 [Flickr])
La Sagrada Familia [official site | wiki], or Catalan for "The Holy Family", is a yet-to-be-finished Roman Catholic basilica in Barcelona, Spain.
The church’s design is rich with Christian symbolism, with façades featuring intricate details describing the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Perhaps the most awe inspiring is the eighteen towers representing the 12 Apostles, 4 Evangelists, the Virgin Mary, and a central tower – the tallest of them all – representing Christ.
The construction of the Sagrada Familia basilica started in 1882, directed by Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí, who devoted his life to it. When people said that the construction had taken a very long time, Gaudí replied that he was building the church for God, and that his client wasn’t in a hurry. He then became known as "God’s Architect."
In 1926, Gaudí got run over by a street car. Because of his raggedy attire and empty pockets, no one wanted to take him to the hospital. Eventually, he was taken to a pauper’s hospital where no one recognized him until his friends found him and tried to move him to another hospital. Gaudí refused, saying that he belonged with the poor, and died a few days later.
Because Gaudí refused to work with blue prints, preferring to use his imagination and memory instead, construction of La Sagrada Familia was halted after his death. Part of the church was even burnt during the Spanish Civil War. Construction of La Sagrada Familia was restarted afterwards and continues until today.
St. Basil’s Cathedral
St. Basil’s Cathedral (Image Credit: kirkh [Flickr])
St. Basil’s Cathedral at night (Image Credit: rwike77 [Flickr])
As its name implies, St. Basil’s Cathedral [wiki] on the Red Square in Moscow, Russia, is named after Saint Basil (who is also known as Basil Fool for Christ). The story goes that in the 1500s, an apprentice shoemaker/serf named Basil stole from the rich to give to the poor. He also went naked, weighed himself with chains, and rebuked Ivan the Terrible for not paying attention in church. Most of the time, admonishing anyone with name "the Terrible" wasn’t such a good idea, but apparently Ivan had a soft spot for the holy fool (as Basil was also known) and ordered a church to be built in his name after Basil died.
St. Basil’s Cathedral, a Russian Orthodox church, sports a series of colorful bulbous domes that taper to a point, aptly named onion domes, that are part of Moscow’s Kremlin skyline (although the church is actually not part of the Kremlin).
Oh, and Ivan the Terrible lived up to his name after he supposedly blinded the architect who built the church so he would not be able to design something as beautiful afterwards.
Simply a gorgeous night photo of Hagia Sophia (Image Credit: Qaoz [Flickr])
Technically, Hagia Sophia [wiki] (Greek for the Church of the Holy Wisdom of God) is no longer a church, it is now a museum in Istanbul, Turkey. It began its life as an early Christian church, then rebuilt as the seat of the Eastern Orthodox Church in Constantinople, then a mosque when the city fell to the Turks in 1453 before it finally became a museum.
Hagia Sophia as we know it today was completed by Byzantine Emperor Justinian I in 537. When completed, the temple was so large and richly decorated that Justinian proclaimed "Solomon, I have surpassed thee!". It remained the largest church for one thousand years after it was completed.
Hagia Sophia is one of the greatest surviving examples of Byzantine architecture, with a large central dome and interior intricately decorated with mosaics, marbles, and stone inlays. The dome, often referred to as the vault of heaven, was a new architectural feature at the time, necessitating the invention of a new pillar support system.
Today, the restoration of Hagia Sophia is a delicate balance of restoring Christian iconographic mosaics under historic Islamic art, which would have to be destroyed to reveal the work underneath.
St. Peter’s Basilica
St. Peter’s Basilica (Image Credit: dionc [Flickr])
St. Peter’s Basilica at night (Image Credit: MichaelTurk [Flickr])
Cupola or dome of St. Peter’s Basilica (Image Credit: robert_562 [Flickr])
Ornately detailed interior of the St. Peter’s Basilica (Image Credit: scot2342 [Flickr])
The largest religious building in the world, not to mention the center of Christianity, I suppose, belongs in this list. St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City is built over the tomb of St. Peter the Apostle, and is the largest church in the tiny country. It is truly immense: the church covers an area of 5.7 acres (2.3 ha) and has a capacity of over 60,000 people.
Before St. Peter’s Basilica as we know it was built, there was already a church there built in 324 C.E. by Emperor Constantine, the first Christian emperor of Rome. That church lasted for about 1,200 years until the crumbling structure was torn down to build the modern-day basilica. St. Peter’s Basilica was built by the who’s who of the Renaissance era: Michelangelo designed the dome, Gian Lorenzo Bernini designed the main square, and Donato Bramante was the first architect of the church.
Interior HDR of Notre Dame (Image Credit: mircea tudorache [Flickr]). [Update 5/9/07: Oops, not Notre Dame de Paris. It's Notre Dame in Montreal. Still, I left it up because it is quite a beautiful photo.]
Another interior picture of Notre Dame (Image Credit: eugene [Flickr])
South Rose Window of Notre Dame (Image Credit: robert_562 [Flickr])
Notre Dame de Paris [wiki] or simply Notre Dame is the quintessential example of Gothic Architecture. Construction of the church started in 1163, when Bishop Maurice de Sully decided to build a cathedral befitting his status as the bishop of Paris. Notre Dame was completed some 200 years later – one of the first European cathedrals to be built on a truly monumental scale.
A particularly striking feature of Notre Dame are its Rose Windows – massive (at the time they were the largest windows in the world) circular stained glass windows that depict scenes from the bible.
Legend has it that when Notre Dame’s bell "Emmanuel" was recast in the 1600s, women threw their gold jewelry into the molten metal to give the bell its unique ring.
At the end of the 18th century, during the French Revolution, the church was ransacked, its treasures plundered and many of the statues of saints were beheaded. Notre Dame was dedicated to the Cult of Reason and then the Cult of the Supreme Being – for a while, it was even used as a barn!
In 1831, Notre Dame was made famous by Victor Hugo, who wrote "The Hunchback of Notre Dame," about Quasimodo, a hunchback bell ringer who fell in love with the Gypsy Esmeralda. The popularity of the book spurred a gothic revival in France and helped the restoration of the cathedral back to its original splendor.
Hallgrímskirkja [wiki] (Icelandic for the Church of Hallgrímur), the tallest building in Iceland, is named after Hallgrímur Pétursson, a 17th century poet and clergyman.
The church’s unusual design (some had likened it to a rude hand gesture) is supposed to represent volcanic columns rising between the steeple tower – a reference to Iceland’s many volcanoes.
The iconic building looks like it belongs in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Indeed, many aspects of Tolkien’s work was inspired by Norse mythologies and many of the fictional names in the book are Norse in origin, although there is no reference that Hallgrímskirkja served as a model any of the towers in the book.
Jubilee Church
Richard Meier’s Jubilee Church (Image Credit: alaninabox [Flickr])
Back view of the church (Image Credit: alaninabox[Flickr])
You can’t miss the distinctive curved walls of The Jubilee Church [wiki] in Tor Tre Teste, Rome. It was designed in 1996 by architect Richard Meier, who said that the modern-styled church is the "the crown jewel of the Vicariato di Roma’s (Archdiocese of Rome) Millennium project." And right he was!
The curved walls not only serve the engineering purpose of minimizing thermal peak loads in the interior space, they are also a religious methapor:
Three circles of equal radius generate the profiles of the three shells that, together with the spine-wall, make up the body of the nave. While the three shells discretely imply the Holy Trinity, the reflecting pool symbolizes water in the ritual of Baptism.
Notre Dame du Haut
Notre Dame du Haut or Ronchamp (Image Credit: jimgrant [Flickr])
If there was a church modeled after Elvis’ hair, Le Corbusier’s Notre Dame du Haut is it. The pilgrimate chapel is located in Ronchamp, France. Indeed, it is more famous than the little town that most people simply call the structure itself Ronchamp.
The cleverness of unusual design of the billowing concrete roof is apparent when it rains: water pours off the slanted roof onto a fountain, creating a dramatic waterfall.
Although quite different from his usual design, Notre Dame du Haut is considered one of Le Corbusier’s finest work.
The Crystal Cathedral [official site | wiki] is neither made of crystal nor is it a cathedral. Nevertheless, the Christian megachurch in the city of Orange Garden Grove, California, is one amazing church.
Built by "The Hour of Power" televangelist Rev. Dr. Robert H. Schuller (who started out with a "drive-in" church located in an actual, old drive-in movie theater!) and his wife Arvella, and designed by architect Philip Johnson, the church is made almost entirely out glass with a web-like framework of steel.
From the outside, the Crystal Cathedral is shaped like a giant four-pointed crystal star, with the main "cathedral" rising 12 stories above the ground, featuring a mirror-like exterior composed of some 12,000 panes of glass. The view is even more amazing from the interior, where the transparent glass lets in the surrounding view, sunlight and the sky.
The Crystal Cathedral also has one of the largest pipe organs in the world, called the Hazel Wright Pipe Organ, with 5 consoles controlling 270 ranks, 31 digital ranks, and more than 16,000 pipes!
Bonus: Darth Vader Grotesque
Waaaay up near the top of the tower of the Washington National Cathedral, there is a carved grotesque (a structural element to deflect rainwater from the building, similar to a gargoyle) shaped like … Darth Vader!
How did the Star Wars villain get there? Turns out in the 1980s, the Cathedral sponsored a sculpture design competition for children. Four winning designs were chosen: a raccoon, a girl with pigtails and braces, a man with large teeth and an umbrella, and lastly, Darth Vader.
If you must know, the Darth sculpture was proposed by Christopher Rader of Kearney, Nebraska.
Computer programmer Amy Hughes built a fantastically detailed 7 feet by 5 1/2 feet by 30 inches miniature church out of LEGO, called the Abston Church of Christ.
Why Abston? That’s because LEGO is made out of Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene (ABS). It took her over a year to build the church.
Bonus: The Dog Chapel
Stephen Huneck’s Dog Chapel, complete with statue of a man walking his dog
After his dogs (and loving wife!) helped him recover from a serious illness that doctors thought would kill him, artist Stephen Huneck decided to build a chapel in honor man’s best friend.
Huneck built the dog chapel on his mountain-top farm in St. Johnsbury, Vermont. Inside, there are four pews with dog sculptures, a fantastic dog stained-glass window and other interesting dog-themed arts.
Let me be the first to acknowledge that this list is far from complete. There are hundreds more of magnificent churches around the world. If your favorite church is not included, it is not a slight – please leave your suggestion in the comment section.
They say the only certainties are death and taxes. Death may be the better option…
BACKGROUND
Oliver Wendell Holmes called taxes “the price we pay for civilization.” But few things provoke more outrage in people than being taxed. The first recorded tax evader was imprisoned by Holy Roman Emperor Constantine in A.D. 306. The greatest revolt in English history occurred in 1381 when Richard II imposed a poll, or “head,” tax. The first armed rebellions against the newly formed United States were Shay’s Rebellion in 1786 (by New England farmers against property taxes) and the Whiskey Rebellion of 1791 (against a liquor tax). During the French Revolution in 1789, all tax collectors were rounded up and sent to the guillotine. And despite all that, governments persist in extracting revenue from their reluctant citizenry. Here are some of the more peculiar examples through the centuries:
URINE TAX
Imposed by the Roman emperor Nero, around A.D. 60. Why urine? The contents of public toilets were collected by tanners and laundry workers for the ammonia, which was used for curing leather and bleaching togas. Nero slapped a fee on the collectors (not the producers) and it was such a money-raiser that Nero’s successor, Vespasian, continued the tax. When his son, Titus, complained about the gross nature of the tax, Vespasian is reputed to have held up a gold coin and said, “Non olet” (“This doesn’t stink”).
SOUL TAX
Peter the Great, czar of Russia, imposed a tax on souls in 1718…meaning everybody had to pay it (it’s similar to a head tax or a poll tax). Peter was antireligious (he was an avid fan of Voltaire and other secular humanist philosophers), but agreeing with him didn’t excuse anyone from paying the tax—if you didn’t believe humans had a soul, you still had to pay a “religious dissenters” tax. Peter also taxed beards, beehives, horse collars, hats, boots, basements, chimneys, food, clothing, all males, as well as birth, marriage, and even burial.
BACHELOR TAX
A favorite strategy of governments to encourage population growth and raise money at the same time. Julius Caesar tried it in 18 B.C. The English imposed it in 1695. The Russians under Peter the Great used it in 1702, as did the Missouri legislature in 1820. The Spartans of ancient Greece didn’t care about the money—they preferred public humiliation. Bachelors in Sparta were required to march around the public market in wintertime stark naked, while singing a song making fun of their unmarried status.
WIG POWDER TAX
In 1795 powdered wigs were all the rage in men’s fashion. Desperate for income to pay for military campaigns abroad, British prime minister William Pitt the Younger levied a tax on wig powder. Although the tax was short-lived due to the protests against it, it did ultimately have the effect of changing men’s fashions. By 1820 powdered wigs were out of style.
WINDOW TAX
Pitt the Younger also tried a chimney tax, but found that windows were easier to count. People paid the tax based on the number of windows in their home. Result: a lot of boarded-up windows.
LONG-DISTANCE TAX
On June 30, 2006, the U.S. Treasury Department stopped collecting a 3% federal excise tax on long-distance calls—familiar to billpayers as one of a list of taxes tacked onto every phone bill. The purpose of the tax? To help pay for the Spanish-American war…in 1898. Phone service was so rare at the time that the tax was intended to impact only the wealthiest Americans. But the tax persisted long after the war ended, and virtually every American household ended up paying it. “It’s not often you get to kill a tax,” Treasury Secretary John Snow said after the tax was repealed, “particularly one that goes back so far in history.” Taxpayers can file for a refund for the last three years the tax existed…but not for the previous 105. (Note: There’s still a 3% excise tax on local phone calls.)
The 19th book in this fan-favorite series contain such gems like The Greatest Plane that Never Was, Forgotten Robot Milestones, Ancient Beauty Secrets, and more.
Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts.
Balthazar Napoleon de Bourbon, an Indian lawyer and part-time farmerin the Bhopal suburb of India, may be the last king of France!
This Indian father-of-three is being feted as the long-lost descendent of the Bourbon kings who ruled France from the 16th century to the French revolution. A distant cousin of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, he is alleged to be not only related to the current Bourbon king of Spain and the Bourbon descendants still in France, but to have more claim than any of them to the French crown.
1492: Columbus, having sailed the ocean blue, notices Indians smoking and thus becomes the first known European to encounter tobacco. Indians take pains to look "cool" while smoking so as to exact a small measure of revenge for their coming annihilation.
1556: The fashion-forward French become the first Europeans to take to smoking.
1557: By now, European doctors are recommending smoking to combat bad breath and cancer. That’s right: bad breath and cancer.
1607: King James I publishes a scathing indictment of smoking, calling it a "vile custom" and a "filthy novelty" that is "dangerous to the lungs." Tobacco company executives promptly swear before the king’s court that there is absolutely no proof that smoking is vile, filthy, a custom, or a novelty, let alone dangerous to the lungs.
1610: Sir Francis Bacon notes that it is kind of hard to quit smoking.
We’re just going to skip ahead here 384 years to:
Photo: Stephen Crowley
1994: Seven tobacco executives swear before the United States Congress that nicotine is not addictive.
Now, back to our timeline:
1624: Pope Urban VII threatens to excommunicate those who snort snuff because sneezing is too similar to orgasm. (Really.)
1724: Pope Benedict XIII, a smoker, overturns Urban’s ban on tobacco.
1761: British scientist John Hill publishes the first study to point out that ever since people started snorting snuff, there seems to be a lot of nose cancer floating around.
1776: American tobacco is used as collateral for French loans, helping to pay for the American Revolution.
1890: Per capita, American adults chew three pounds of tobacco annually.
1912: Dr. Isaac Adler publishes research that, for the first time, argues strongly that smoking may cause lung cancer. Tobacco company executives race to Dr. Adler’s house and swear on a stack of Bibles that smoking does no such thing.
1921: Tobacco marketing has kicked into high gear: R. J. Reynolds spends $8 million on advertising, promoting their slogan "I’d Walk a Mile for a Camel" (And, Boy, Would I Be Out of Breath).
1940: Per capita, American adults smoke 2,558 cigarettes per year (more than 7 per day).
1950: Three major studies definitely prove that smoking causes lung cancer.
1963: After trying out a tattooed sailor, Philip Morris settles on a cowboy as the Marlboro Man. Beginning in 1975, the Marlboro Man is played by Wayne McLaren, who dies in 1992 at the age of 51 from lung cancer.
1966: First Surgeon General’s Warnings appear on cigarette packages in the United States.
1971: TV and radio tobacco ads for cigarettes disappear as a result of 1969 legislation.
2004: Despite extensive anti smoking efforts, tobacco smoke still kills about 440,000 Americans every year.
______
From mental_floss’ book Scatterbrained, published in Neatorama with permission.
Be sure to visit mental_floss‘ extremely entertaining website and blog!
Any picture can speak 1,000 words, but only a select few say something poignant enough to galvanize an entire society. The following photographs screamed so loudly that the entire world stopped to take notice.
1. The Photograph That Raised the Photojournalistic Stakes: "Omaha Beach, Normandy, France" Robert Capa, 1944
"If your pictures aren’t good enough," war photographer Robert Capa used to say, "you aren’t close enough." Words to die by, yes, but the man knew of what he spoke. After all, his most memorable shots were taken on the morning of D-Day, June 6, 1944, when he landed alongside the first waves of infantry at Omaha Beach.
Caught under heavy fire, Capa dove for what little cover he could find, then shot all the film in his camera, and got out – just barely. He escaped with his life, but not much else. Of the four rolls of film Capa took of the horrific D-Day battle, all but 11 exposures were ruined by an overeager lab assistant, who melted the film in his rush to develop it. (He was trying to meet the deadline for the next issue of Life magazine.)
In an ironic twist, however, that same mistake gave the few surviving exposures their famously surreal look ("slightly out of focus," Life incorrectly explained upon printing them). More than 50 years later, director Steven Spielberg would go to great lengths to reproduce the look of that "error" for his harrowing D-Day landing sequence in "Saving Private Ryan," even stripping the coating from his camera lenses to echo Capa’s notorious shots.
2. The Photograph That Gave a Face to the Great Depression "Migrant Mother" Dorothea Lange, 1936
As era-defining photographs go, "Migrant Mother" pretty much takes the cake. For many, Florence Owens Thompson is the face of the Great Depression, thanks to legendary shutterbug Dorothea Lange. Lange captured the image while visiting a dusty California pea-pickers’ camp in February 1936, and in doing so, captured the resilience of a proud nation facing desperate times.
Unbelievably, Thompson’s story is as compelling as her portrait. Just 32 years old when Lange approached her ("as if drawn by a magnet," Lange said). Thompson was a mother of seven who’d lost her husband to tuberculosis. Stranded at a migratory labor farm in Nipomo, Calif. her family sustained themselves on birds killed by her kids and vegetables taken from a nearby field – as meager a living as any earned by the other 2,500 workers there. The photo’s impact was staggering. Reproduced in newspapers everywhere, Thompson’s haunted face triggered an immediate public outcry, quickly prompting politicos from the federal Resettlement Administration to send food and supplies. Sadly, however, Thompson and her family had already moved on, receiving nary a wedge of government cheese for their high-profile misery. In fact, no one knew the identity of the photographed woman until Thompson revealed herself years later in a 1976 newspaper article.
3. The Photograph That Brought the Battlefield Home "Federal Dead on the Field of Battle of First Day, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania" Mathew Brady, 1863
As one of the world’s first war photographers, Mathew Brady didn’t start
out having as action-packed a career as you might think. A successful daguerreotypist and a distinguished gentleman, Brady was known for his portraits of notable people such as Abraham Lincoln and Robert E. Lee. In other words, he was hardly a photojournalist in the trenches.
In fact, Brady had everything to lose by making a career move – his money, his business, and quite possibly his life. Nevertheless, he decided to risk it all and follow the Union Army into battle with his camera, saying, "A spirit in my feet said, ‘Go!’" And go he did – at least until he got a good look at the pointy end of a Confederate bayonet.
After narrowly escaping capture at the first Battle of Bull Run, Brady’s chatty feet quieted down a bit, and he began sending assistants in his place. In the span of only a few years, Brady and his team shot more than 7,000 photographs – an astounding number when you consider that developing a single plate required a horse-drawn-wagon-full of cumbersome equipment and noxious chemicals. Not exactly what you’d call "point-and-shoot."
Tethered as he was to his equine-powered darkroom and with film speeds being much slower then, Brady produced war photos that are understandably light on the action and heavy on the aftermath. Still, they mark the first time Americans were so immediately confronted with the grim realities of the battlefield.
4. The Photograph That Ended a War But Ruined a Life "Murder of a Vietcong by Saigon Police Chief" Eddie Adams, 1968
"Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world," AP photojournalist Eddie Adams once wrote. A fitting quote for Adams, because his 1968 photograph of an officer shooting a handcuffed prisoner in the head at point-blank range not only earned him a Pulitzer Prize in 1969, but also went a long way toward souring Americans’ attitudes about the Vietnam War.
For all the image’s political impact, though, the situation wasn’t as black-and-white as it’s rendered. What Adams’ photograph doesn’t reveal is that the man being shot was the captain of a Vietcong "revenge squad" that had executed dozens of unarmed civilians earlier the same day. Regardless, it instantly became an icon of the war’s savagery and made the official pulling the trigger – General Nguyen Ngoc Loan – its iconic villain.
Sadly, the photograph’s legacy would haunt Loan for the rest of his life. Following the war, he was reviled where ever he went. After an Australian VA hospital refused to treat him, he was transferred to the United States, where he was met with a massive (though unsuccessful) campaign to deport him. He eventually settled in Virginia and opened a restaurant but was forced to close it down as soon as his past caught up with him. Vandals scrawled "we know who you are" on his walls, and business dried up.
Adams felt so bad for Loan that he apologized for having taken the photo at all, admitting, "The general killed the Vietcong; I killed the general with my camera."
5. The Photograph That Isn’t as Romantic as You Might Think "V-J Day, Times Square, 1945", a.k.a. "The Kiss" Alfred Eisenstaedt, 1945
On August 14, 1945, the news of Japan’s surrender was announced in the United States, signaling the end of World War II. Riotous celebrations erupted in the streets, but perhaps none were more relieved than those in uniform. Although many of them had recently returned from victory in
Europe, they faced the prospect of having to ship out yet again, this time to the bloody Pacific.
Among the overjoyed masses gathered in Times Square that day was one of the most talented photojournalists of the 20th century, a German immigrant named Alfred Eisenstaedt. While snapping pictures of the celebration, he spotted a sailor "running along the street grabbing any and every girl in sight." He later explained that, "whether she was a grandmother, stout, thin, old, didn’t make any difference."
Of course, a photo of the sailor planting a wet one on a senior citizen wouldn’t have made the cover of Life, but when he locked lips with an attractive nurse, the image was circulated in newspapers across the country. Needless to say, "V-J Day" didn’t capture a highly anticipated embrace by long-lost lovers, but it also wasn’t staged, as many critics have claimed. In any case, the image remains an enduring symbol of America’s exuberance at the end of a long struggle.
6. The Photograph That Destroyed an Industry "Hindenburg" Murray Becker, 1937
Forget the Titanic, the Lusitania, and the comparatively unphotogenic accident at Chernobyl. Thanks to the power of images, the explosion of the Hindenburg on May 6, 1937, claims the dubious honor of being the quintessential disaster of the 20th century.
In the grand scheme of things, however, the Hindenburg wasn’t all that disastrous. Of the 97 people aboard, a surprising 62 survived. (in fact, it wasn’t even the worst Zeppelin crash of the 20th century. Just four years earlier, the U.S.S. Akron had crashed into the Atlantic killing more than twice as many people.) But when calculating the epic status of a catastrophe, terrifying photographs and quotable quotes ("Oh, the humanity!") far outweigh body counts.
Assembled as part of a massive PR campaign by the Hindenburg’s parent company in Germany, no fewer than 22 photographers, reporters, and newsreel cameramen were on the scene in Lakehurst, N.J. when the airship went down. Worldwide publicity of the well-documented disaster shattered the public’s faith in Zeppelins, which were, at the time, considered the safest mode of air travel available.
During the 1920s and 1930s, Zeppelins had operated regular flights, totting civilians back and forth between Germany and the Americas. But all of that stopped in 1937. The incident effectively killed the use of dirigibles as a commercially viable mode of passenger transport, ending the golden age of the airship not with a whimper, but with a horrific bang that was photographed and then syndicated around the globe.
7. The Photograph That Saved the Planet "The Tetons – Snake River" Ansel Adams, 1942
Some claim photography can be divided into two eras: Before Adams and After Adams. In Times B.A., for instance, photography wasn’t widely considered an art form. Rather, photographers attempted to make their pictures more "artistic" (i.e., more like paintings) by subjecting their exposures to all sorts of extreme manipulations, from coating their lenses with petroleum jelly to scratching the surfaces of their negatives with needles. Then came Ansel Adams, helping shutterbugs everywhere get over their collective inferiority complex.
Brashly declaring photography to be "a blazing poetry of the real," Adams eschewed manipulations, claiming they were simply derivative of other art forms. Instead, he preached the value of "pure photography." In an era when handheld point-and-shoot cameras were quickly becoming the norm, Adams and other landscape photographers clung to their bulky, old-fashioned large-format cameras. Ultimately, Adams’ pictures turned photography into fine art. What’s more, they shaped the way Americans thought of their nation’s wilderness and, with that, how to preserve it.
Adams’ passion for the land wasn’t limited to vistas he framed through the lens. In 1936, he accompanied his photos to Washington to lobby for the preservation of the Kings Canyon area in California. Sure enough, he was successful, and it was declared a national park.
8. The Photograph That Kept Che Alive "The Corpse of Che Guevara" Freddy Alborta, 1967
Sociopathic thug? Socialist luminary? Or as existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre called him, "the most complete human being of our age"? Whatever you believe, there’s no denying that Ernesto "Che" Guevara has become the patron saint of revolutionaries. Undeniably, he is a man of mythical status – a reputation that persists less because of how he lived than because of how he died.
Unenthused by his efforts to incite revolution among the poor and oppressed in Bolivia, the nation’s army (trained and equipped by the U.S. military and the CIA) captured and executed Guevara in 1967. But before dumping his body in a secret grave, they gathered around for a strategic photo op. They wanted to prove to the world that Che was dead, in hopes that his political movement would die with him. in fact, anticipating charges that the photo had been faked, Che’s thoughtful captors amputated his hands and preserved them in formaldehyde.
But by killing the man, Bolivian officials unwittingly birthed his legend. The photo, which circulated around the world, bore a striking resemblance to Renaissance paintings of Christ taken down from the cross. Even as Che’s killers preened and gloated above him (the officer on the right seems to be inadvertently pointing to a wound on Guevara’s body near where Christ’s final wound was inflicted), Che’s eerily peaceful face was described as showing forgiveness. The photo’s allegorical significance certainly wasn’t lost on the revolutionary protesters of the era. They quickly adopted "Che lives!" as a slogan and rallying cry. Thanks to this photograph, "the passion of the Che" ensured that he would live on forever as a martyr for the socialist cause.
9. The Photograph that Allowed Geniuses to Have a Sense of Humor "Einstein with his Tongue Out" Arthur Sasse, 1951
Arthur Sasse/AFP-Getty Images
You may appreciate this memorable portrait as much as the next fellow, but it’s still fair to wonder: "Did it really change history?" Rest assured, we think it did. While Einstein certainly changed history with his contributions to nuclear physics and quantum mechanics, this photo changed the way history looked at Einstein. By humanizing a man known chiefly for his brilliance, this image is the reason Einstein’s name has become synonymous not only with "genius," but also with "wacky genius."
So why the history-making tongue? It seems Professor Einstein, hoping to enjoy his 72nd birthday in peace, was stuck on the Princeton campus enduring incessant hounding by the press. Upon being prodded to smile for the camera for what seemed like the millionth time, he gave photographer Arthur Sasse a good look at his uvula instead. This being no ordinary tongue, the resulting photo became an instant classic, thus ensuring that the distinguished Novel Prize-winner would be remembered as much for his personality as for his brain.
10. The Photograph That Made the Surreal Real "Dalí Atomicus" Philippe Halsman, 1948
Philippe Halsman / Estate of Philippe Halsman
Philippe Halsman is quite possibly the only photographer to have made a career out of taking portraits of people jumping. But he claimed the act of leaping revealed his subjects’ true selves, and looking at his most famous jump, "Dalí Atomicus," it’s pretty hard to disagree.
The photograph is Halsman’s homage both to the new atomic age (prompted by physicist’ then-recent announcement that all matter hangs in a constant state of suspension) and to Dalí’s surrealist masterpiece "Leda Atomica" (seen on the right, behind the cats, and unfinished at the time). It took six hours, 28 jumps, and a roomful of assistants throwing angry cats and buckets of water into the air to get the perfect exposure.
But before settling on the "Atomicus" we know today, Halsman rejected a number of other concepts for the shot. One was the idea of throwing milk instead of water, but that was abandoned for fear that viewers, fresh from the privations of World War II, would condemn it as a waste of milk. Another involved exploding a cat in order to capture it "in suspension," though that arguably would have been a waste of cats.
Halsman’s methods were as unique as they were effective. His celebrity "jump" portraits appeared on at least seven Life magazine covers and helped usher in a new – and radically more adventurous – era of portrait photography.
11. The Photograph That Lied "Loch Ness Monster" a.k.a. "The Surgeon’s Photo" Ian Wetherell, 1934
While strange sightings around Scotland’s murky Loch Ness date back to 565 C.E., it wasn’t until photography reached the Loch that Nessie Fever really took off. The now-legendary (and legendarily blurry) "surgeon’s photo," reportedly taken in April of 1934, fueled decades of frenzied speculation, several costly underwater searches, and a local tourism industry that rakes in several million dollars each year.
But the party almost ended in 1994, when a report was published saying that model-maker Christian Spurling admitted to faking the photo. According to Spurling’s statement, his stepfather, Marmaduke Wetherell, worked as a big game hunter and had been hired by London’s Daily Mail to find the beast. But rather than smoke out the creature, he decided to fake it. Wetherell, joined by Spurling and his son, Ian, built their own monster to float on the lake’s surface using a toy submarine and some wood putty. Ian actually took the photo, but to lend more credibility to the story, they convinced an upstanding pillar of the community – surgeon Robert Kenneth Wilson – to claim it as his own. Just goes to prove the old adage, "The camera never lies." People, on the other hand, do.
12. The Photograph That Almost Wasn’t "Gandhi at his Spinning Wheel" Margaret Bourke-White, 1946
"Gandhi at his Spinning Wheel," the defining portrait of one of the 20th century’s most influential figures, almost didn’t happen, thanks to the Mahatma’s strict demands. Granted a rare opportunity to photograph India’s leader; Life staffer Margaret Bourke-White was all set to shoot when Gandhi’s secretaries stopped her cold: If she was going to photograph Gandhi at the spinning wheel (a symbol for India’s struggle for independence), she first had to learn to use one herself.
But that wasn’t all. The ascetic Mahatma wasn’t to be spoken to (it being his day of silence.) And because he detested bright light, Bourke-White was only allowed to use three flashbulbs. Having cleared all these hurdles, however, there was still one more – the humid Indian weather, which wreaked havoc on her camera equipment. When time finally came to shoot, Bourke-White’s first flashbulb failed. And while the second one worked, she forgot to pull the slide, rendering it blank.
She thought it was all over, but luckily, the third attempt was successful. In the end, she came away with an image that became Gandhi’s most enduring representation. it was also among the last portraits of his life; he was assassinated less than two years later.
13. The Photograph That Foreshadowed the Future "Le Violon d’Ingres" Man Ray, 1924
Before there was photoshop, there was Man Ray. One of the world’s most original photographers, Ray was tireless experimenter. In fact, his work was so inventive that he eventually left the camera behind altogether, creating his surreal "Rayographs" entirely in the darkroom.
"Le Violon d’Ingres" is perhaps his best-known photograph, and one of his earliest. Like many pieces from the Dada movement (which Ray is credited with bringing to the United States), it’s a visual pun. By drawing f-holes on his model’s back, he points out the similarities between the body of a woman and the body of a violin. But it’s a literal pun, as well. Both the model’s dress and pose echo a famous painting by French artist Jean-Auguste-Dominiqe Ingres, whose hobbies were depicting female nudes and playing the violin.
More than just highbrow it, however, Ray’s work was far ahead of its time. By ridiculing a now-obsolete concept – the photographic image as literal interpretation of reality – his pictures foreshadowed our own digital revolution.
__________
The article above was written by Ransom Riggs for the Jan – Feb 2007 issue of mental_floss magazine, featured on Neatorama in partnership with mental_floss.
Be sure to check out mental_floss‘ fantastic website and blog:
Georg Cantor’s (1845 – 1918) brilliance is such that other mathematicians talk about him in reverent, almost mystical tones. The German mathematician David Hilbert (1862 – 1943) once said, "No one shall expel us from the Paradise that Cantor has created." We’d try to explain that paradise, except we don’t even remotely understand it.
Cantor [wiki] basically invented set theory [wiki], which allowed him to solve Zeno’s Achilles paradox [wiki] by proving that some infinities are – get this – bigger than other infinities. (Ergo, we are able to walk through a door because all the infinities involved in getting halfway to the door are, relatively speaking, small.) Such massively abstract thinking can make you feel a little bonkers, and Cantor was no exception – he suffered several nervous breakdowns and spent the last years of his life trying to prove that God was a kind of infinite number and that Francis Bacon wrote Shakespeare’s plays.
2. Alexandre Grothendieck
Although he lives in hiding and communicates only via occasional, thousands-of-pages-long letters to colleagues, Alexandre Grothendieck [wiki] is widely considered one of the most important mathematicians of the 20th century. A radical environmentalist and Communist, Grothendieck has, since the 1980s, communicated his mathematical concepts primarily in very long, handwritten letters that circulate among mathematicians. The 1,600-page Long Walk Through Galois Theory, for instance, doesn’t strike us as a very compelling beach read, but Grothendieck’s colleagues have been poring over it for 25 years.
3. Oliver Heaviside
In his 30s, British engineer and mathematician Oliver Heaviside [wiki] (1950 1850 – 1925) made important discoveries in how to transform [wiki] differential equations [wiki] into relatively simple algebra, a discovery that had a profound impact on the lives of advanced calculus students and absolutely no one else. In the last decades of his life, Heaviside’s lifelong eccentricity morphed into madness. He started painting his fingernails pink – which while perfectly acceptable now was weird in the 1920s – and he moved all the furniture out of his house, replacing everything with granite blocks of varying sizes.
4. Walter Petryshyn
Shortly after the publication of his book on nonlinear functions in 1996, Ukrainian-American mathematician Walter Petryshyn discovered the book contained an error. Terrified that he would be the laughing stock of the nonlinear function community, he went mad – in both senses of the word. His depression and paranoia culminated with the murder of his wife. All of which just goes to prove what we told our parents when they saw our grades in calculus: Chill out, man. It’s just math.
5. Evariste Galois
One of the inarguable facts of the human condition is that mathematicians, as a class, do not excel at dueling. But apparently no one ever told this to Evariste Galois [wiki], the 19th-century Frenchman whose contributions to algebra got a theory named after him [wiki]. Galois didn’t live to see himself get famous, though, because he died in a duel at the ripe old age of 20. Here’s the crazy part, though: Some believe that Galois staged the duel to look like a police ambush, in hopes that his death might incite a democratic revolution. (Talk about delusions of grandeur.)
______
From mental_floss’ book Scatterbrained, published in Neatorama with permission.
Be sure to visit mental_floss‘ extremely entertaining website and blog!
Yesterday, the residents of Samoa began driving on the left side of the road instead of the right. This is the first major switch since the 1970s, when Ghana, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone made the change. Randy James of Time magazine has an article exploring how different nations came to use different sides of the road:
The Morris Museum in Morristown, New Jersey has a permanent display called “Musical Machines & Living Dolls”, featuring over 700 antique automata, including quite a few fancily-dressed mechanical monkeys from France.
But
after having written the script for the American Revolution, Paine found
that his services were no longer required. He was given a number of minor
political posts by the Continental Congress during the war, but just to
keep him out of the way. Wealthy, politically ambitious Brahmins like
John Jay and John Adams were not prepared to give a loose cannon like
Paine any responsibility. 
But
Paine had already fled. The French, recognizing a kindred spirit, had
elected Paine to a seat in their revolutionary government, the National
Convention. 
Paine
hung out in France until 1802, just to make sure the revolution was safe.
(It wasn't. By this time, Napoleon had seized power and set up a military
dictatorship). Fed up with the infighting among the French, Paine returned
to America. 
The
Man Behind the Law: Archimedes of Syracuse (287-212 B.C.), was
a Greek geometer and is often regarded as one of the greatest mathematicians
and scientists who ever lived.
The
Man Behind the Law: Robert Hooke (1635 - 1702) was an English
physicist and polymath. As you can see, Hooke was an ugly man (he was
severely disfigured by smallpox). (Photo: 
The
Man Behind the Law: Daniel Bernoulli (1700-1782) was polymath
that came from a family of extraordinary Swiss mathematicians. In fact,
his father, Johann Bernoulli, and his uncle, Jacob, were famous mathematicians.
The
Man Behind the Law: John Dalton (1766 - 1844) grew in a poor
family, was a poor speaker, severely color-blind, and was even considered
a crude or simple experimentalist. Yet, he achieved significant professional
successes and made great contributions to chemistry, meteorology, and
physics.
The
Man Behind the Law: Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier (1768 - 1830)
was a French mathematicians and Egyptologist.
The
article above is but a small selection of the amazing trivia and fascinating
stories about some of the greatest names in science. If you love science,
or would like to instill the love of science to your children, pick up
Cliff Pickover's Archimedes to Hawking: Laws of Science and the Great
Minds Behind Them. You won't be disappointed
Today, abacus is mostly synonymous with the Chinese suanpan version, but in actuality it had been used in Babylon as early as 2400 BC. The abacus was also found in ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome. Even the Aztecs had their own version.
In 1614, Scottish mathematician John Napier proposed a radical idea called logarithm that made calculations by hand much easier and quicker. (That wasn’t his only contribution to math: Napier was a big proponent of the decimal point, which wasn’t much in use until he came around.)
In 1623, Wilhelm Schickard of the University of Tübingen, Württemberg (now part of Germany), invented the first mechanical calculator. Schickard’s contemporaries called the machine the Speeding Clock or the Calculating Clock. 
Wilhelm Schickard died of the Bubonic Plague in 1635, thirteen years after inventing the world’s first mechanical calculator. The prototype and plans for the calculator was lost to history until the 20th century, when the machine’s design was discovered among Kepler’s papers.
was inspired by a steps-counting machine (pedometer) he saw to build his own calculator.
In 1801, straw hat maker and inventor Joseph Marie Jacquard created a punch-card controlled loom that enabled one person to produce fabric in a fraction of the time it would take a traditional silk weaver to make.
Since the invention of Schickard’s calculator, it took nearly 200 years for calculators to become commercially successful. 
In the early 1800s, numerical tables, such as for polynomial functions, were routinely calculated by humans. They were actually called "computers" (meaning "one that computes"). Understandably, this process was filled with human errors.
In 1847, self-taught British mathematician George Boole invented a branch of algebra that dealt with logic. In Boole’s system, logic operations can be boiled down to three steps: union (OR), intersection (AND), and complementation (NOT). Boole’s idea was brilliant – but at the time, it was criticized and completely ignored by his contemporaries. 
In 1941, despite financial hardship and isolation from computer scientists from other Western countries, German computer pioneer Konrad Zuse created the world’s first programmable computer, the Z3, from spare telephone parts.
In 1939, Britain intelligence set up the Government Code and Cypher School under the codename "ULTRA" at Bletchley Park (then known as Station X), 50 miles north of London. Bletchley Park workers included a motley group of mathematicians, computer scientists, and even crossword experts and chess champions. Amongst them was 
When he was working on his doctoral thesis in physics, Howard H. Aiken ran into a problem – he needed numbers for his theory of space-charge conduction in vacuum tubes, but the problem was too complex for calculators of the day. The solution was obvious: build a bigger calculator!
The birth of the world’s first electronic digital computer was ushered … by war. In 1943, on the eve of World War II, the US military realized
Hopper went on to create the first compiler for a computer programming language (the A-0 System for the UNIVAC in 1952) and worked on the development of COBOL, one of the earliest high-level programming languages that allowed programmers to use words instead of machine codes. To acknowledge her contributions, the U.S. Navy named a ship after her (it’s a 
Antoine Lavoisier, the Father of Modern Chemistry, was beheaded during the French Revolution.
Amongst the myriad of weird houses from around the world, here’s a true gem: the Broken Column House created by aristocrat François Nicolas Henri Racine de Monville before the French Revolution.
A look at the future, as predicted in the past. Or maybe, a look at what the present would have been like if the predictions of the past came to pass. Anyway way you look at it, the future ain’t what it used to be!
The truth was, none of them had a chance. By the time the contest was announced, 
an arts exposition being held nearby, but the cost, estimated at $500,000, was too high. When automaker André Citroën learned of the project, he offered to pay for it himself…in exchange for the right to put his company name and corporate symbol in lights as well. The City agreed. "The Eiffel Tower," Blake Ehrlich write in Paris on the Seine, "became the world’s largest electric sign, its outlines traced in lights." The lights were so popular that the tower remained lit with various designs until 1937. 
The Sanctuary of Our Lady of Las Lajas, or the 
Waaaay up near the top of the tower of the Washington National Cathedral, there is a carved grotesque (a structural element to deflect rainwater from the building, similar to a gargoyle) shaped like … 
They say the only certainties are death and taxes. Death may be the better option…
Balthazar Napoleon de Bourbon, an Indian lawyer and part-time farmerin the Bhopal suburb of India, may be the last king of France!
1492: Columbus, having sailed the ocean blue, notices Indians smoking and thus becomes the first known European to encounter tobacco. Indians take pains to look "cool" while smoking so as to exact a small measure of revenge for their coming annihilation.
1624: Pope Urban VII threatens to excommunicate those who snort snuff because sneezing is too similar to orgasm. (Really.)
1761: British scientist John Hill publishes the first study to point out that ever since people started snorting snuff, there seems to be a lot of nose cancer floating around.
1963: After trying out a tattooed sailor, Philip Morris settles on a cowboy as the Marlboro Man. Beginning in 1975, the Marlboro Man is played by Wayne McLaren, who dies in 1992 at the age of 51 from lung cancer.
Georg Cantor’s (1845 – 1918) brilliance is such that other mathematicians talk about him in reverent, almost mystical tones. The German mathematician David Hilbert (1862 – 1943) once said, "No one shall expel us from the Paradise that Cantor has created." We’d try to explain that paradise, except we don’t even remotely understand it.
Although he lives in hiding and communicates only via occasional, thousands-of-pages-long letters to colleagues, 
In his 30s, British engineer and mathematician 
Shortly after the publication of his book on nonlinear functions in 1996, Ukrainian-American mathematician Walter Petryshyn discovered the book contained an error. Terrified that he would be the laughing stock of the nonlinear function community, he went mad – in both senses of the word. His depression and paranoia culminated with the murder of his wife. All of which just goes to prove what we told our parents when they saw our grades in calculus: Chill out, man. It’s just math.
One of the inarguable facts of the human condition is that mathematicians, as a class, do not excel at dueling. But apparently no one ever told this to 
-
Your purchase helps support the blog - Thank you!
