Tag

ships

• Astronaut, nautical and the sailor rootAstronaut means star sailor. The naut- root runs through nautical, nausea and Nautilus.
• 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.
• 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 flat-Earth myth and ColumbusEducated Europeans never forgot the Earth was round. The argument with Columbus was about its size, and he was wrong.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.