Tag: history

The Lost City of Hamoukar

These days, when the world is covered by cities, we can be forgiven for thinking that there’s nothing much special about them. You get a bunch of people together, you put them in houses, you add a few businesses, and presto! Instant city. But in fact cities are a relatively recent invention. Modern humans have …

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Clocks

The passage of time has had a lot of attention lately–which makes this the ideal time to honor the clock. The earliest timekeeping device, used as far back as 3,500 B.C., was a vertical stick that casts a shadow. As the sun crossed the sky, the shadow moved; by measuring its movement, the ancients could …

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Science fiction

My interest in science owes a lot to a form of literature my brothers introduced me to at a very early age, and which quickly became my favorite: science fiction (SF for short). Before science fiction was called that there were two writers who nevertheless get included in the genre: France’s Jules Verne and England’s …

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Skateboarding

Skateboarders have become as much a part of the urban landscape as pigeons, scooting down the roads and sidewalks, jumping over curbs, turning any ramp, railing or set of steps into an excuse for acrobatics–seemingly defying the laws of physics. Skateboarding may seem like the ultimate in turn-of-the-millennium hipness, but it’s been around a long …

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Mummies

Half a century after Boris Karloff first played the man in the bandages, The Mummy is once again drawing people in droves to movie theatres. It’s almost like The Mummy has eternal life–which, of course, is the whole idea. A mummy is any dead animal or human body in which soft tissues have been preserved …

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Liberty Bell 7

On July 21, 1961, Virgil Ivan “Gus” Grissom, 33, a decorated fighter pilot, was strapped into the tiny Mercury space capsule he’d nicknamed Liberty Bell 7 and launched into space aboard a Redstone rocket. The U.S.’s first manned spaceflight, Alan Shepard 15-minute sub-orbital flight, had occurred just 2 1/2 months before. Grissom’s mission was nearly …

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The Shroud of Turin

  In medieval times, Holy Relics did boffo box-office. Saints’ finger bones–even entire saints–and pieces of the One True Cross drew the kinds of crowds most CFL teams would envy. Eventually, however, people noticed there were enough pieces of the One True Cross floating around to build a house, and holy relics fell into disrepute–all …

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John Glenn’s return to space

At 9:47 a.m. on February 20, 1962, John Glenn, 41, a U.S. Marine test pilot, strapped into the tiny Mercury space capsule known as Friendship 7, hurtled into space atop an Atlas rocket. In the ensuing four hours and 56 minutes he circled the Earth three times, then splashed down in the Atlantic ocean, 880 …

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Digging for the Spanish Flu

  In late 1917 or 1918, a new strain of influenza appeared in what is now Ft. Riley, Kansas. There’s nothing unusual about that: new strains of influenza appear all the time. At first, this one seemed no worse than any other. But something changed. As this flu spread to the east, it became seven …

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Megaliths

As we lie on our couches and flick our TV remotes, we tend to think we are far more advanced than our distant ancestors, who mostly just struggled to stay alive. But every so often we run across something that reminds us that lack of technology does not equal stupidity. An example recently turned up …

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Detergents

Keeping clean has been a preoccupation of humans for millennia (well, some humans, anyway; there were those unfortunate few centuries in Europe when it wasn’t high on anyone’s list of priorities). Since water is essential to life, people settled near water, and soon learned that it could clean things, too, like clothes (once clothes were …

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Multiple births

In 1934, an Ontario farmer asked his local newspaper if a birth announcement for five babies born at once would cost the same as a birth announcement for a single baby. A local reporter filed a wire story about the farmer’s suddenly expanded family, and almost overnight, the Dionne quintuplets became media celebrities–to the point …

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