Tag
history-of-science
- 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.
- RADAR is an acronymRAdio Detection And Ranging, a US Navy coinage from 1940, and how it changed storm watching.
- The telegraph and the first storm warningsFor the first time, news of a storm could travel faster than the storm itself.
- Father Benito Viñes, Padre HuracánA Jesuit priest in Havana who read the sky so well he issued the first scientific hurricane warning in 1875.
- Galveston 1900 and the dismissed Cuban warningsThe deadliest natural disaster in US history, and the Weather Bureau's refusal to listen to Havana.
- 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.
- The Great Eastern and Isambard Kingdom BrunelWhy anyone built a ship five times too big, and the brilliant engineer it killed.
- Fulton's Nautilus, a submarine for NapoleonRobert Fulton built a working submarine for France in 1800, seven years before his famous steamboat.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Copernicus, 1543Nicolaus Copernicus put the sun at the center and published as he was dying.
- 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.