Who was Captain John Edward Smith and what can we learn from him and his fateful decision? Well Captain Smith was the most senior White Star Line captain in 1912. He was also the first and last captain of the RMS Titanic and he died with his ship when it sank. Was he experienced? Yes….
No, of course you don’t remember. The pollution was the stink and slime of horse manure, and the year was 1890. Horses, those hay burning engines of transportation, produce 15 to 30 pounds of manure per day. Gosh, you need a big baggie to pick up your horse’s droppings when you take it for a…
Two nasty diseases, malaria and yellow fever, held sway in hot, low-lying, tropical and sub-tropical areas for centuries. These areas had high humidity and rapid decomposition of vegetation and when people came down with high fevers that often killed them, they (wrongly) believed that the killer was mal-aria (bad air). The putrid winds from the…
No, this is not the start of a corny joke; it’s the progression of people who worked to bring you the lowly “disposable” battery that seems to be everywhere. The stories Alessandro Volta made the first battery in 1798 by stacking sheets of zinc, acid-moistened cardboard, and copper. In 1836 the English chemist John Frederic…
Consider all the wonderful things we did before computers and “modern” technology
By the mid-1800s London was a crowded, smelly city that killed many of its residents. Well, to be more accurate, cholera killed many people living in the heart of a great, growing city. We know today that cholera is an intestinal infection that leads to severe dehydration and electrolyte imbalance, killing its victim in days….
Amazon is unstoppable. Or is it?
Frederic Tudor, a 19th century Bostonian, had crazy idea. He started shipping blocks of ice from New England lakes to the West Indies in 1806. In the 1830s he packed a ship with ice and shipped it around the world to Calcutta, India. Just imagine loading a sailing ship with well over a hundred tons…
The 2008 “Indy” movie was entertaining (but not as good as the original) and clearly the result of Hollywood imagination. But the story of crystal skulls is more interesting than that and can highlight some of our current problems with “fake news.” So, here’s a bit of history. In 1897 Tiffany’s and Company sold a…
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