Review

Every key fact, one line each. Tap a topic to reread it.

Saturday, October 31, 2026

Disaster means "bad star

• Disaster: Italian dis-astro, bad star
• Astro words share Greek astron (star): astronomy, astrology, astronaut, asterisk, aster, asteroid
• "Ill-starred" carries the same astrology idea in plain English

Astronaut, nautical and the sailor root

• Astronaut: Greek astron (star) + nautēs (sailor) = star sailor
• Nausea literally means seasickness (Greek naus, ship)
• Nautilus: Greek nautilos, sailor; no separate "tilus" root

King Lear: Edmund's star speech and the scientific method

• Gloucester: "These late eclipses in the sun and moon portend no good to us" (1.2)
• Edmund: we "make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars"
• Real eclipses in 1605 came just before Lear was written
• Francis Bacon, Shakespeare's contemporary, pushed observation over omens (Advancement of Learning, 1605)

King Lear: the whole play

• Lear: three daughters, Goneril, Regan, Cordelia
• Gloucester subplot: two sons, Edgar (loyal) and Edmund (illegitimate, the schemer)
• Edgar hides as the mad beggar Poor Tom
• Cordelia: loves him "according to my bond, no more nor less"

King Lear: the great lines, and how to say Gloucester

• Gloucester is pronounced GLOSS-ter
• "O, I have ta'en too little care of this!" (King Lear 3.4)
• "I am a very foolish fond old man" (King Lear 4.7)
• "Poor naked wretches" comes before Lear meets Poor Tom
• Fond once meant foolish; fourscore means eighty

RADAR is an acronym

• RADAR: RAdio Detection And Ranging (US Navy, 1940)
• Radar measures distance by the echo's return time
• Rain "clutter" on wartime radar became weather radar

The telegraph and the first storm warnings

• Telegraph changed storm warnings: reports could outrun the storm
• Morse's first public line: 1844, "What hath God wrought"
• US national weather reports by telegraph began 1870 (Army Signal Corps); Weather Bureau 1891

Father Benito Viñes, Padre Huracán

• Father Benito Viñes (Belén College, Havana): cirrus clouds fan out ahead of a hurricane and point to its center
• Viñes issued the first scientific hurricane warning in 1875, using an observer network linked by telegraph
• Nicknamed Padre Huracán; nobody could see the spiral until satellites

Galveston 1900 and the dismissed Cuban warnings

• Father Benito Viñes warned of hurricanes; Galveston 1900 dismissed the Cuban warnings
• Galveston, Sept 8, 1900: about 6,000 to 12,000 dead, the deadliest US natural disaster
• Willis Moore, Weather Bureau chief, dismissed and blocked the Cuban warnings
• Isaac Cline, Galveston meteorologist, had called a destructive hurricane "an absurd delusion" (1891); brother Joseph Cline worked with him
• Washington forecast the storm would curve toward Florida; Cuba said Texas
• Galveston built a seawall and raised the whole city

How a Cuban warning reached Texas

• Havana to Key West undersea telegraph cable: about 1867, about 90 miles
• Cuban warnings reached the US over that cable, then the mainland telegraph

The transatlantic cables of 1858 and 1866

• 1858 first transatlantic cable (Cyrus Field): Victoria's message took 16 hours, died in 3 weeks
• 1866 lasting transatlantic cable laid by the Great Eastern; Havana to Key West cable about 1867
• The cable ran from Valentia Island, Ireland, to Newfoundland
• Too much voltage killed the 1858 cable

The Great Eastern and Isambard Kingdom Brunel

• Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806–1859): Thames Tunnel, Great Western Railway, Clifton Suspension Bridge, three giant ships
• Great Eastern: about 692 feet, 4,000 passengers, paddles plus screw plus sails
• Built huge to carry coal for a nonstop trip to Australia
• The Suez Canal (1869) made her design obsolete, and she was too big for it
• Launched sideways, stuck for months (1857–58); Brunel died in 1859 just after her trials
• Found her calling laying the 1866 transatlantic cable

Fulton's Nautilus, a submarine for Napoleon

• Fulton built the Nautilus submarine for Napoleon in 1800, seven years before his steamboat
• Clermont steamboat on the Hudson, 1807
• Verne's Nautilus was named after Fulton's

The Count of Monte Cristo and Napoleon

• Monte Cristo opens in 1815 with Napoleon exiled on Elba
• Dantès is jailed in the Château d'If for carrying a letter from Elba
• The Abbé Faria teaches Dantès everything and reveals the treasure of Monte Cristo

Dumas's father, the general who defied Napoleon

• Dumas's father, General Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, was born in Saint-Domingue to a French noble and an enslaved woman
• He fell out with Napoleon in Egypt and was imprisoned at Taranto, 1799 to 1801
• Tom Reiss, The Black Count (2012, Pulitzer)

The Suez Canal and the route to India and Australia

• Suez Canal opened November 17, 1869 (Ferdinand de Lesseps); about 120 miles, no locks
• London to Bombay: about 10,700 nautical miles around Africa, about 6,200 through Suez
• Suez made the Great Eastern's design obsolete

The Red Sea rift and Bab-el-Mandeb

• The Red Sea is a rift where the Arabian plate pulls away from Africa, about 1 cm a year
• Afar, in Ethiopia and Djibouti, is where three rifts meet
• Bab-el-Mandeb means Gate of Grief; about 20 miles wide

Eratosthenes measures the Earth

• Eratosthenes (air-uh-TOSS-thuh-neez), father of geography: measured Earth with one 7.2° angle and one distance
• Euclid: a line crossing parallel lines makes equal alternate angles
• Bematists: Greek pacers who measured distance by counting steps (bēma = step)
• 7.2° is 1/50 of a circle; 5,000 stadia × 50 = 250,000 stadia
• True circumference about 24,901 miles; his figure was close

The shadow stick and why the lines meet at Earth's center

• At Alexandria the shadow was about 1/8 of the stick's height, about 7.2°
• A scaphe is a bowl sundial with angle marks
• A plumb line hangs toward Earth's center, so extended sticks meet there

Why the sun's rays count as parallel (Aristarchus)

• Aristarchus (about 260 BC) put the sun about 20 times farther than the Moon; really about 400
• Even that showed the sun's rays are effectively parallel over 500 miles
• Aristarchus proposed a sun-centered system 1,800 years before Copernicus

The flat-Earth myth and Columbus

• Educated medieval Europeans knew the Earth was round
• The Columbus flat-Earth story was popularized by Washington Irving, 1828
• The real 1492 dispute was the Earth's size; Columbus underestimated it and the experts were right

Copernicus, 1543

• Copernicus 1543: Earth moves around the sun, published as he was dying
• De revolutionibus orbium coelestium; Osiander's preface called it only a calculating tool

Bruno, Galileo and "Eppur si muove

• Bruno burned February 17, 1600, Campo de' Fiori; mainly for theological heresy
• Galileo 1633: convicted, house arrest; "Eppur si muove" (And yet it moves) is likely legend
• Galileo saw Jupiter's moons and Venus's phases (1610)
• Church acknowledged its error in 1992

Mark Twain's The Innocents Abroad

• Twain sailed on the Quaker City, June to November 1867
• He mailed about 50 letters to the Daily Alta California, about $20 each, as he traveled
• The Innocents Abroad (1869) was his best-selling book in his lifetime

Jules Verne's A Floating City

• A Floating City (1871) is based on Verne's own 1867 Great Eastern crossing
• The story: Fabian, Ellen and her villainous husband Harry Drake; ends at Niagara Falls
• Worth reading today mainly for the eyewitness picture of the Great Eastern

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas

• Twenty Thousand Leagues (1869–70): 20,000 leagues is distance traveled, about 50,000 miles, not depth
• Nemo is Latin for "no one"
• Aronnax, Conseil and Ned Land escape the Nautilus in the Maelstrom off Norway
• In The Mysterious Island, Nemo is revealed as Prince Dakkar of India