✦ Faria

How to use Faria

Each lesson topic has its own page. Days lists each session and the topics covered that day. Tags groups topics by subject. Review lists every key fact as one line, good for a quick refresh. Search looks through the full text of every page.

At the bottom of each topic you'll find related topics that share a tag.

Who was the Abbé Faria?

In Dumas's The Count of Monte Cristo, the Abbé Faria is the imprisoned priest who tunnels into Edmond Dantès's cell in the Château d'If and gives him a complete education. This log is named for him: the teacher in the next cell, with every lesson kept to study again.

Saturday, October 31, 2026

From a "bad star" to measuring the Earth with a stick

The first session. It started with one word, disaster, and wandered through Shakespeare, hurricanes, undersea cables, giant ships, submarines, Dumas, the Suez Canal and the ancient Greeks, ending with how Eratosthenes measured the Earth. The topics are listed in the order we covered them.

  1. Disaster means "bad starThe word disaster comes from Italian dis-astro, a bad star, and belongs to a big family of star words.
  2. Astronaut, nautical and the sailor rootAstronaut means star sailor. The naut- root runs through nautical, nausea and Nautilus.
  3. King Lear: Edmund's star speech and the scientific methodGloucester blames eclipses; his son Edmund mocks blaming the stars, a modern idea in a play about ancient Britain.
  4. King Lear: the whole playTwo families, two foolish fathers. Lear has three daughters; Gloucester has two sons.
  5. King Lear: the great lines, and how to say GloucesterPoor naked wretches, I have ta'en too little care of this, a very foolish fond old man, and GLOSS-ter.
  6. RADAR is an acronymRAdio Detection And Ranging, a US Navy coinage from 1940, and how it changed storm watching.
  7. The telegraph and the first storm warningsFor the first time, news of a storm could travel faster than the storm itself.
  8. Father Benito Viñes, Padre HuracánA Jesuit priest in Havana who read the sky so well he issued the first scientific hurricane warning in 1875.
  9. Galveston 1900 and the dismissed Cuban warningsThe deadliest natural disaster in US history, and the Weather Bureau's refusal to listen to Havana.
  10. How a Cuban warning reached TexasThe undersea telegraph cable from Havana to Key West, laid around 1867, tied Cuba into the US wire network.
  11. The transatlantic cables of 1858 and 1866Cyrus Field's first cable carried Queen Victoria's message in 16 hours and died in three weeks; the Great Eastern laid the one that lasted.
  12. The Great Eastern and Isambard Kingdom BrunelWhy anyone built a ship five times too big, and the brilliant engineer it killed.
  13. Fulton's Nautilus, a submarine for NapoleonRobert Fulton built a working submarine for France in 1800, seven years before his famous steamboat.
  14. The Count of Monte Cristo and NapoleonEdmond Dantès is jailed for carrying a letter from Elba, and meets the Abbé Faria in the Château d'If.
  15. Dumas's father, the general who defied NapoleonGeneral Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, born enslaved in Saint-Domingue, fell out with Napoleon and was imprisoned, the seed of Monte Cristo.
  16. The Suez Canal and the route to India and AustraliaOpened in 1869, the canal cut London to Bombay from about 10,700 to about 6,200 nautical miles.
  17. The Red Sea rift and Bab-el-MandebThe long narrow Red Sea is a crack where Africa and Arabia are pulling apart, closed at the south by the Gate of Grief.
  18. Eratosthenes measures the EarthAbout 240 BC, one angle (7.2°) and one distance gave the size of the whole planet.
  19. The shadow stick and why the lines meet at Earth's centerHow the 7.2° was measured at Alexandria, and why a plumb line points to the center of the Earth.
  20. Why the sun's rays count as parallel (Aristarchus)The Greeks already knew the sun was very far away, so rays reaching two cities 500 miles apart are effectively parallel.
  21. The flat-Earth myth and ColumbusEducated Europeans never forgot the Earth was round. The argument with Columbus was about its size, and he was wrong.
  22. Copernicus, 1543Nicolaus Copernicus put the sun at the center and published as he was dying.
  23. Bruno, Galileo and "Eppur si muoveWere people put to death for saying the Earth isn't the center? Bruno was burned in 1600, mostly for theology; Galileo was convicted in 1633.
  24. Mark Twain's The Innocents AbroadTwain sailed on the Quaker City in 1867 and mailed newspaper letters home as he went; they became his best-selling book.
  25. Jules Verne's A Floating CityVerne's 1871 novel of his own 1867 crossing on the Great Eastern. Good as a travelogue today, thin as a story.
  26. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the SeasProfessor Aronnax, Conseil and Ned Land aboard the Nautilus with Captain Nemo, "no one." The leagues are distance traveled, not depth.