Tag

geography

• How a Cuban warning reached TexasThe undersea telegraph cable from Havana to Key West, laid around 1867, tied Cuba into the US wire network.
• The Great Eastern and Isambard Kingdom BrunelWhy anyone built a ship five times too big, and the brilliant engineer it killed.
• 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.
• 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.
• Eratosthenes measures the EarthAbout 240 BC, one angle (7.2°) and one distance gave the size of the whole planet.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.